What's in the Store? A Review of Arabic Medical and Health Apps in the App Store
Creators: name: Akbar, Fatema
name: Fernandez Luque, Luis
Publisher: name: American University of Bahrain
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 460608
subject: Mobile computing
classificationCode: 4608
subject: Human-centred computing
classificationCode: 460806
subject: Human-computer interaction

description: Mobile Health, also known as mHealth, is a fast growing business within eHealth. Health apps (mobile applications) are very popular today. There are thousands of apps available in Google Play Store, the iOS App Store, and other platforms. However, it is not an easy task to find reliable health apps. In fact, there are health apps that can be harmful (e.g. giving incorrect diagnosis and treatment suggestions). While there have been some studies on the quality of health-related language-specific mobile applications (e.g. English and Spanish apps), these studies are often limited to apps relating to certain keywords such as “cancer” or “diabetes”. Our study is a comprehensive review of all apps available in Arabic in the “Medical” and “Health and Fitness” categories of the Android app store. Arabic is one of the largest languages in the world with over 400 million speakers. In many Arabic-speaking countries, mobile internet penetration is high, and the active use of mobile apps -such as games and social media- is popular. There are reports suggesting that most connected users across continents use the internet to search for health information. Therefore, studying the status of the available Arabic health-related apps is essential to understand the opportunities and risks to the users seeking and sharing health-related information though these apps. The apps and their meta-data were obtained through An App Market Application Programming Interface (API) that provides access to all Android apps’ meta-data such as name, description, date created, number of downloads, developers and app rating. We queried the API to collect all apps in the “Medical” and “Health and Fitness” categories that are in Arabic by default, or have an internationalization option that converts the app to Arabic. This query returned 1,820 apps. The analysis of the meta-data revealed that the number of Arabic health-related apps increases drastically year by year, For example, the apps created in the first quarter of 2016 are more than all the apps created in 2015, and more than all apps created from 2011 to 2014. 28% of the apps have more than 5,000 downloads, which shows the popularity of these apps. A word count of app names shows that the most frequent words are “recipes” and “weight”, which is consistent with our observation of the concerning popularity of apps promoting certain weight-loss diets, recipes for beauty, and recipes for home-remedies that are from untrusted sources but provided under the “medical” category of the app store. We generated a preliminary coding scheme to describe the purpose of the apps by analyzing the content (app description, screenshots or website) of the first 30 apps and categorizing them based on categories reported in other mHealth studies. Apps were found to belong to nine categories, including Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Symptom Checkers, Health Services, among others. Using this coding scheme, two Arabic speakers independently reviewed a random selection of 60 apps to validate the coding scheme. Inter-rater agreement of the coded data as determined by Cohen’s kappa was high (.66), but revealed that minor changes to the coding scheme were required (e.g. raters disagreed on whether apps for new mothers fall into the child health or women health category). The revised coding scheme can be used to code all apps in a future study either by applying machine learning methods or by manual labeling. For this short study, we provide a presentation and synthesis of the characteristics of the 1,820 collected apps and an overview of app categories as found in the 60 labeled apps. We also highlight the implications of the observed trends in Arabic health-related apps.