A Review and Content Analysis of National Apps for Covid-19 Management Using Mobile Application Rating Scale (Mars) Publisher Pubmed



Salehinejad S¹ ; Niakan Kalhori SR² ; Hajesmaeel Gohari S¹ ; Bahaadinbeigy K³ ; Fatehi F^{4, 5}
Source: Informatics for Health and Social Care Published:2021

Abstract

The expansion of mobile health apps for the management of COVID-19 grew exponentially in recent months. However, no study has evaluated these apps. The objective of this study was to develop a reliable measure and rate the quality of COVID-19 mobile health apps, to eventually provide a roadmap for future mHealth app development. In this study, we used COVID-related keywords to identify apps for iOS and Android devices. 13 apps (13.5% of the total number of apps identified) were selected for evaluation. App quality was assessed independently using MARS by two reviewers. Search queries yielded a total of 97 potentially relevant apps, of which 13 met our final inclusion criteria. Kendall’s coefficient of concordance value for the inter-rater agreement was 0.93 (p = .03). COVID-19 GOV PK app had the highest average MARS score (4.7/5), and all of the apps had acceptable MARS scores (> 3.0). This study suggests that most COVID-related apps meet acceptable criteria for quality, content, or functionality, and they must highlight esthetic and interesting features for overall quality improvement to be welcomed by users. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.