A Review and Assessment Framework for Mobile-Based Emergency Intervention Apps

Smartphone applications to support healthcare are proliferating. A growing and important subset of these apps supports emergency medical intervention to address a wide range of illness-related emergencies to speed the arrival of relevant treatment. The emergency response characteristics and strategies employed by these apps are the focus of this study, resulting in an mHealth Emergency Strategy Index. While a growing body of knowledge focuses on usability, safety, and privacy aspects that characterize such apps, studies that map the various emergency intervention strategies and suggest assessment indicators to evaluate their role as emergency agents are limited. We survey an extensive range of mHealth apps designed for emergency response along with the related assessment literature and present an index for mobile-based medical emergency intervention apps that can address future assessment needs of mHealth apps.