A preliminar analysis and comparison of international projects on mobile devices and mHealth Apps for heart failure

Mobile health applications hold great potential to facilitate self-care, which is associated with improved health outcomes, reduced readmission rates, and health care costs in several chronic health conditions. Among others, Heart Failure is able to represent at the highest level this paradigm since it is the final pathway of many cardiac diseases and its prevalence increases exponentially for aged people (>70 years). While a great number of Apps and technologies exist to assess such condition and to support its management, few clinical studies and referred projects have been carried out to transform such Apps into tools accepted from the medical community and used for approved care. In this scenario, we present a review of 13 clinical trials and 3 European projects dealing with Apps for Heart Failure and a public App collection recognized by UK authorities to help researchers, physicians, and App designers to make their ideas well accepted for the medical community.