Healthy Apps: Use or Not to Use?
By: Healthy Spacer
Tags: Habits, Mobile Apps, Smartphones, Healthy Mind, Mental Health

Healthy Apps are mobile Applications which are used for implementing regular positive health practices in peoples’ life. Also some of these Apps have functions to monitor users’ health status, these means the applications provide some basic statistics using the data users added to the App. Healthy Apps may be used for developing different habits and health practices.

First of all, let’s discuss sports Apps. Some of them provide online workout with a coach. Workout may be recorded or may be in real-time, in this case the coach can give you feedback on your practice and explain to you how to do exercises properly.

Secondly, there is such a category as “healthy lifestyle” Apps. These Apps usually remind you to drink water, do some sports and sometimes help to eat healthy food and control for calories and proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Some healthy Apps can be connected with smart bracelets or smart watches, this would allow to take into account user’s activity and sometimes basic parameters such as heart rate.

Thirdly, mental health Apps, which is a new category of healthy Apps which allow users who can not afford therapy to get support and somehow deal with mental health issues (Baumel, 2019). However, you should be careful using mental health Apps as not all of them were created with the support of specialists and almost none of them were proved to be successful for dealing with mental health diseases (Wang et al., 2020). What is more, according to Wang (2020) research some mental health Apps may be harmful for their users’ mental health.

Fourthly, new applications for women have recently become popular. These are Kegel exercise Apps to strengthen the pelvic floor. They are usually used by women who are recovering from childbirth and sometimes by women who got testimony from the doctors to strengthen the pelvic floor. These Apps usually explain the way Kegel exercises should be done and also users can connect the Kegel device with special sensors detecting the technique of the exercise. When the device is connected to the app the App sends notifications to the user to correct the technique.

As you can see, there are a lot of different Apps which are supposed to help people to be healthy and control their health status. However, nowadays we can not be sure that these applications would be useful for us. Peng et al. (2016) have conducted a qualitative study of healthy Apps usage. Six focus groups and five individual interviews were conducted in the Midwest region of the U.S. with a mixture of 44 smartphone owners of various social economic status. As a result you can see below some reasons to use (or not to use) healthy Apps.

For some people it is hard to adopt healthy Apps and get used to the new format of self health care. Some people have difficulties with continuing using healthy Apps, they forget about them or just do not see the result and stop using the App. Online activity may be much more interesting and instead of doing sports online some people prefer to watch new movies. Lack of motivation does not allow people to regularly use healthy Apps. Lack of motivation is also related to the absence of a tutor in the App, so not everyone has enough motivation to do some exercises without the need to report about the results. However, Apps know how to motivate you. Tracking for awareness and progress is an important part of any App. The majority of them provide some statistics about a user’s success in training or diet and sometimes routine exercises may be done in a playful way. To better motivate users to use the App there are “reminder” functions. However, for some users these reminders may be annoying and this is the other reason to stop using the App. Goals setting is important both for those who know what they want to improve and for newcomers who are just starting taking care of their health. So, Apps provide the “goals setting” function which is a great way to motivate yourself and continue training or following the healthy diet. Information provided in the App and ability to get personalised guidance attracts people as all the necessary information and guidelines are gathered in one place. So, the user does not have to look for any unknown term, technique or special diet — he or she can get it in the App. However, sometimes users are not sure about the credibility of the information they get in the App. So,App’s rating and reviews from other users is an important characteristic of the App. The reason why some people even do not start using healthy Apps is that they care about their personal information and do not want to share it with anyone. Each App should have confidentiality policies, however sometimes the leak of information may happen.

So, it is up to you to decide whether to use healthy Apps or not. Stay tuned!