What Is Offered on Mobile Applications in Spanish About Diabetes Mellitus?

In recent years, technological development has opened up new possibilities for health support, mobile health (mHealth) being one of them. mHealth apps are becoming more accessible to patients and are oriented to a variety of diseases, from the most common to the least prevalent.^1,2 What is more, it has been reported that the information and additional support provided by these technologies can improve the patient-physician relationship in many aspects such as patients’ confidence, self-management, quality of life, and even health outcomes such as glycemic index control in diabetes, on which this letter focuses its interest. ³ Due to this background, we analyzed the features of free diabetes apps in the Google Play Store.

For that purpose, we searched the term “Diabetes” in the Google Play Store on January 23, 2017, and filtered the results using the “free” apps option. Only apps in Spanish and with the following characteristics were considered: number of downloads, qualification, and target audience. For functions and features, the following were considered: documentation, information, communication, analysis, suggestions for cooking recipes, reminder, and counseling/emotional support. ⁴

A total of 114 mobile applications were obtained; 39 were excluded based on inability to match criteria. Of the total, 70 (93.3%) had the patients as their target. Within this group, 46 (65.71%) showed only one type of function, the most frequent related to “information.” The functions with the most downloads and qualifications were related to the following topics: analysis, documentation, and reminder. The remaining functions are described in detail in Table 1.

Table 1.

Downloads and Grades According to Patient-Directed Application Functions (N = 70).

Function	n	%	Downloads (Med.)	Grades (Med.)
Analysis	21	30.0	10 000	4.4
Communication	14	20.0	5500	4.4
Counseling	4	5.7	5500	4.3
Documentation	27	38.6	10 000	4.4
Information	40	57.1	750	4.3
Recipe/cooking	26	37.1	5000	4.2
Reminder	15	21.4	10 000	4.4

The majority of analyzed applications showed a single function, which matches with previous studies that explored diabetes apps in other languages. ⁴ Applications that are related to diabetes self-management were the most popular; however, without a medical guidance according to the type of diabetes, its use can be dangerous. It is important at this point to emphasize that privacy, accuracy, and security should be guaranteed. Related to this matter, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has claimed that applications should be medically regulated, especially when patients receive recommendations about outcomes, diagnoses, and treatments. ⁵ Finally, we consider it important to report these results so we can all to be aware of what patients are exposed to and consider their interests.