SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
Mobile Applications for the Promotion and Support of Healthy Nutrition and Physical Activity Habits: A Systematic Review, Extraction of Features and Taxonomy Proposal
María Vanessa Villasana1, *, Ivan Miguel Pires2, 3, Juliana Sá1, 4, Nuno M. Garcia2, Eftim Zdravevski5, Ivan Chorbev5, Petre Lameski5, Francisco Flórez-Revuelta6
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 12
First Page: 50
Last Page: 71
Publisher ID: TOBIOIJ-12-50
DOI: 10.2174/1875036201912010050
Article History:
Received Date: 21/08/2019Revision Received Date: 25/09/2019
Acceptance Date: 22/10/2019
Electronic publication date: 20/12/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
Mobile applications can be used for the monitoring of lifestyles and physical activity. It can be installed in commodity mobile devices, which are currently used by different types of people in their daily activities worlwide .
Objective:
This paper reviews and categorizes the mobile applications related to diet, nutrition, health, physical activity and education, showing the analysis of 73 mobile applications available on Google Play Store with the extraction of the different features.
Methods:
The mobile applications were analyzed in relation to each proposed category and their features, starting with the definition of the search keywords used in the Google Play Store. Each mobile application was installed on a smartphone, and validated whether it was researched in scientific studies. Finally, all mobile applications and features were categorized.
Results:
These mobile applications were clustered into four groups, including diet and nutrition, health, physical activity and education. The features of mobile applications were also categorized into six groups, including diet, anthropometric parameters, social, physical activity, medical parameters and vital parameters. The most available features of the mobile applications are weight, height, age, gender, goals, calories needed calculation, diet diary, food database with calories, calories burned and calorie intake.
Conclusion:
With this review, it was concluded that most mobile applications available in the market are related to diet, and they are important for different types of people. A promising idea for future work is to evaluate the acceptance by young people of such mobile applications.
