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Mobile Applications for Type 2 Diabetes Risk Estimation: a Systematic Review

  • Mobile Systems
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Abstract

Screening for chronical diseases like type 2 diabetes can be done using different methods and various risk tests. This study present a review of type 2 diabetes risk estimation mobile applications focusing on their functionality and availability of information on the underlying risk calculators. Only 9 out of 31 reviewed mobile applications, featured in three major mobile application stores, disclosed the name of risk calculator used for assessing the risk of type 2 diabetes. Even more concerning, none of the reviewed applications mentioned that they are collecting the data from users to improve the performance of their risk estimation calculators or offer users the descriptive statistics of the results from users that already used the application. For that purpose the questionnaires used for calculation of risk should be upgraded by including the information on the most recent blood sugar level measurements from users. Although mobile applications represent a great future potential for health applications, developers still do not put enough emphasis on informing the user of the underlying methods used to estimate the risk for a specific clinical condition.

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Acknowledgments

This study was partially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a SCOPES 2013 Joint Research Projects grant SNSF IZ73Z0_152415. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Maribor, Zitna ulica 15, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia

    Nino Fijacko, Petra Povalej Brzan & Gregor Stiglic

  2. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia

    Petra Povalej Brzan & Gregor Stiglic

Authors
  1. Nino Fijacko
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  2. Petra Povalej Brzan
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  3. Gregor Stiglic
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Correspondence to Gregor Stiglic.

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Fijacko, N., Brzan, P.P. & Stiglic, G. Mobile Applications for Type 2 Diabetes Risk Estimation: a Systematic Review. J Med Syst 39, 124 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0319-y

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