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The rapid advancements in mobile technologies are transforming the practice of healthcare. The World Health Organization (WHO) global survey suggests that mHealth may well change health services across the globe (Ginsburg, 2014; WHO, n.d.). In 2019, most of the Americans (96%) own a cellphone and 81% of Americans have a smart phone (Pew Research Center, 2019). In 2017, there were 3.7 billion mobile health application downloads by smartphone users worldwide (US Food and Drug Administration, 2019). Mobile health technology, or “mHealth” thus is recognized as one of the fastest growing fields, and calls for interdisciplinary approaches to support its research, development, and evaluation.
mHealth empowers users, including patients, health care professionals, care givers, family and friends and more, with fast and easy access to health information and ample resources. Wearable technologies, for example, allow users to monitor their health data and provide just-in-time suggestions or advice on healthy choices enables users to manage their health and wellness, facilitate just-in-time learning, and promote healthy living (FDA, 2019; Jameel et al., 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, mHealth applications have played crucial roles to promote public health through timely services like information sharing, disease detection, early screening, monitoring, education and more (Alam et al., 2021; Asadzadeh, & Kalankesh, 2021; Alzahrani et al., 2022).
Despite its growing popularity and affordability, evidence-based research is rather limited on mHealth (Brown, Yen, Rojas & Schnall, 2013; Free et al. 2013). With the thrive of mHealth technologies, effective design is critical to promote customized learning for mobile users. But research indicates that more than 95% of mHealth apps have not been tested or studied scientifically (Brown, Yen, Rojas & Schnall, 2013), most have no indication of expert input from healthcare professionals (Charbonneau et al., 2020), and many trials and research do not provide evidences on the benefits of their mHealth interventions (Free et al. 2013). Researchers call for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework to guide mHealth research and practice (Rincon, Monteiro-Guerra, Rivera-Romero, Dorronzoro-Zubiete, Sanchez-Bocanegra, & Gabarron, 2017; Milne-Ives et al., 2020; Wilhide III et al., 2016).
Recent reviews have examined mHealth technologies for a particular user population (e.g., Alam et al., 2021; Jameel et al., 2022), or mHealth in response to global public health threats like the pandemic (Alam et al., 2021; Asadzadeh, & Kalankesh, 2021). But still, very little is known about the design frameworks for mobile health technology. For example, what design frameworks or principles guide the creation of mHealth technologies? More importantly, what can we learn from the existing research on mHealth technology design frameworks? After many rounds of searches with different search engines, we have not found any research reviews focusing on mHealth design frameworks. Thus, the objective of this review is to examine the most recent literature to assess the state-of-the-art of mHealth technology design frameworks and guidelines. State-of-the-art review has been used in many informative studies in healthcare to provide the current thinking and practices in the field, through critical analyses of the latest literature (Dey et al., 2019; de Chazal et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2017; Paglialonga et al., 2018). This multi-phased state-of-the-art review critically examined selected refereed mHealth technology publications, and explored the following questions: