A Review of Critical Features and General Issues of Freely Available mHealth Apps For Dietary Assessment

TL;DR

This review analyzes the features, usability, and design issues of freely available dietary mHealth apps, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses to guide future improvements in clinically accurate and user-friendly solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of existing dietary apps, identifying key features and challenges to inform future development and research in mHealth dietary assessment tools.

Findings

Identified key features that enhance app usability.

Highlighted common design issues affecting user engagement.

Recommended future research directions for clinically accurate apps.

Abstract

Obesity is known to lower the quality of life substantially. It is often associated with increased chances of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, various cancers, etc. Evidence suggests that diet-related mobile applications play a vital role in assisting individuals in making healthier choices and keeping track of food intake. However, due to an abundance of similar applications, it becomes pertinent to evaluate each of them in terms of functionality, usability, and possible design issues to truly determine state-of-the-art solutions for the future. Since these applications involve implementing multiple user requirements and recommendations from different dietitians, the evaluation becomes quite complex. Therefore, this study aims to review existing dietary applications at length to highlight key features and problems that enhance or undermine an application's usability. For this purpose, we have examined the published literature from various scientific databases of the PUBMED, CINAHL (January 2010-December 2019) and Science Direct (2010-2019). We followed PRISMA guidelines, and out of our findings, fifty-six primary studies met our inclusion criteria after identification, screening, eligibility and full-text evaluation. We analyzed 35 apps from the selected studies and extracted the data of each of the identified apps.Following our detailed analysis on the comprehensiveness of freely available mHealth applications, we specified potential future research challenges and stated recommendations to help grow clinically accurate diet-related applications.