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Tools for evaluating the content, efficacy, and usability of mHealth applications: A Systematic Review. (Preprint)


 BACKGROUND
 In mobile application stores there are many applications focused on health. And many more appear every day. Unfortunately, few of those applications pass any type of quality control. The only way to assess its quality is the opinion of the users of those applications. This opinion is usually of a very limited and subjective scale. This makes it necessary to use a reliable tool to measure the quality of health applications that reach the user.
 
 
 OBJECTIVE
 The present systematic review seeks to psychometrically analyse the tools currently used to measure the quality of mobile health applications. In this way it would be possible to choose the best tool when measuring the quality of said applications.
 
 
 METHODS
 A search was made of tools to measure the quality of mobile applications in the Pubmed database. Studies in which no type of validation was performed were excluded. The measurement tools were analysed following the Cosmin guideline.
 
 
 RESULTS
 The initial search showed 687 articles. After reading the title and summary, only 48 were selected to make a deeper analysis. Of these, only 15 met the inclusion criteria and were chosen to be analysed in this review. 5 articles were excluded when failing to validate any of the recommended psychometric characteristics. This left a total of 10 articles comprising 8 measurement tools. After the analysis with the COSMIN guideline, 1 tool met 1 criterion of the guide, 2 tools met 3, 3 tools met 4 and 2 tools met 6 criteria of the 10 of the COSMIN guideline. Some of the tools only measure usability, while other tools measure up to 5 dimensions. Only 2 tools have a version for the professional and another version for the user.
 
 
 CONCLUSIONS
 Of the tools analysed, the Health-ITUES scale has the best psychometric validation among the existing tools. However, this tool is very focused on measuring usability. The MARS tool, on the other hand, has a moderate number of validated psychometric characteristics but measures a greater number of dimensions in the health applications. Its use is also widespread.
