Mobile Personal Health Records (PHRs) have achieved a particularly strong market share since the appearance of more powerful mobile devices and popular worldwide mobile application markets such as Apple's App Store and Android's Google Play. However, Android and Apple have a set of recommendations on design and usability targeted towards developers who wish to publish apps in their stores: Android Design Guidelines and iOS Human Interface Guidelines. This paper aims to evaluate compliance with these guidelines by assessing the usability recommendations of a set of 24 selected mobile PHR applications. An analysis process based on a well-known Systematic Literature Review (SLR) protocol was used. The results show that the 24 mobile PHR applications studied are not suitably structured. 46 % of these applications do not use any of the recommended patterns, using instead lists or springboards, which are deprecated patterns for top-level menus. 70 % of the PHRs require a registration to be able to test the application when these interactions should be delayed. Our study will help both PHR users to select user-friendly mobile PHRs and PHR providers and developers to identify the good usability practices implemented by the applications with the highest scores.

The huge increase in the number and use of smartphones and tablets has led health service providers to take an interest in mHealth. Popular mobile app markets like Apple App Store or Google Play contain thousands of health applications. Although mobile personal health records (mPHRs) have a number of benefits, important challenges appear in the form of adoption barriers. Security and privacy have been identified as part of these barriers and should be addressed. This paper analyzes and assesses a total of 24 free mPHRs for Android and iOS. Characteristics regarding privacy and security were extracted from the HIPAA. The results show important differences in both the mPHRs and the characteristics analyzed. A questionnaire containing six questions concerning privacy policies was defined. Our questionnaire may assist developers and stakeholders to evaluate the security and privacy of their mPHRs.

Resumen: Durante los últimos años, el uso de dispositivos móviles como teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas ha suscitado gran interés entre los proveedores de servicios de salud en el mundo de la mSalud. Las Carpetas Personales de Salud (en inglés Personal Health Record o PHR) móviles proporcionan numerosas ventajas y aunque hay estudios que indican que los pacientes están dispuestos a utilizarlos, los índices de uso son aún bajos. La seguridad y la privacidad han sido identificadas como una importante barrera para lograr su amplia adopción. Haciendo uso de un método adaptado de la revisión sistemática de literatura se identificaron 24 PHRs móviles para Android e iOS. La seguridad y privacidad de estos PHRs móviles fueron evaluadas usando un cuestionario de 12 preguntas. Nuestra investigación muestra que los desarrolladores de PHRs móviles han de mejorar sustancialmente sus políticas de privacidad.