Changes in Mobile Health Apps Usage Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak in China: Semilongitudinal Survey

作者：Le Yang, Jiadong Wu, Xiaoxiao Mo, Yaqin Chen, Shanshan Huang, Linlin Zhou, Jiaqi Dai, Linna Xie, Siyu Chen, Hao Shang, B. Shiva Rao, Bingtao Weng, Ayiguli Abulimiti, Siying Wu, Xiaoxu Xie · 发表于：JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.2196/40552 · 被引用次数：29 · 研究领域：Mobile Health and mHealth Applications、COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing、Digital Mental Health Interventions

Background Mobile health (mHealth) apps are rapidly emerging technologies in China due to strictly controlled medical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing essential services for chronic diseases. However, there have been no large-scale, systematic efforts to evaluate relevant apps. Objective We aim to provide a landscape of mHealth apps in China by describing and comparing digital health concerns before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, including mHealth app data flow and user experience, and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on mHealth apps. Methods We conducted a semilongitudinal survey of 1593 mHealth apps to study the app data flow and clarify usage changes and influencing factors. We selected mHealth apps in app markets, web pages from the Baidu search engine, the 2018 top 100 hospitals with internet hospitals, and online shopping sites with apps that connect to smart devices. For user experience, we recruited residents from a community in southeastern China from October 2019 to November 2019 (before the outbreak) and from June 2020 to August 2020 (after the outbreak) comparing the attention of the population to apps. We also examined associations between app characteristics, functions, and outcomes at specific quantiles of distribution in download changes using quantile regression models. Results Rehabilitation medical support was the top-ranked functionality, with a median 1.44 million downloads per app prepandemic and a median 2.74 million downloads per app...