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Evaluating the Privacy Policies of Mobile Personal Health Records for Pregnancy Monitoring

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
  • Published:
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Abstract

A mobile personal health record (mPHR) for pregnancy monitoring allows the pregnant woman to track and manage her personal health data. However, owing to the privacy and security issues that may threaten the exchange of this sensitive data, a privacy policy should be established. The aim of this study is to evaluate the privacy policies of 19 mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring (12 for iOS and 7 for Android) using a template covering the characteristics of privacy, security, and standards and regulations. The findings of this study show that none of the privacy policies evaluated entirely comply with the characteristics studied. The developers of mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring are, therefore, requested to improve and pay more attention to the structure and the content of the privacy policies of their apps.

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Acknowledgements

This work was conducted within the research project MPHR-PPR1-2015-2017. The authors would like to thank the Moroccan MESRSFC and CNRST for their support. It is also a part of the GINSENG project (TIN2015-70259-C2-2-R) supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Project Management research team, ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Rabat, Morocco

    Mariam Bachiri & Ali Idri

  2. Department of Informatics and Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    José Luis Fernández-Alemán & Ambrosio Toval

Authors
  1. Mariam Bachiri
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  2. Ali Idri
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  3. José Luis Fernández-Alemán
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  4. Ambrosio Toval
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Correspondence to Mariam Bachiri.

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All the authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Table 3 Evaluation results of the privacy policies of the selected mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring
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Bachiri, M., Idri, A., Fernández-Alemán, J.L. et al. Evaluating the Privacy Policies of Mobile Personal Health Records for Pregnancy Monitoring. J Med Syst 42, 144 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-018-1002-x

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