Review of mobile phone use in preventive medicine and disease management

There is no systematic review of mobile phone based applications for disease management in the current literature. This review will summarize current literature about disease prevention, diagnosis, and management with telemedicine applications that use a mobile phone. A systematic review of current literature for telemedicine applications that use mobile phones in the care of chronic disease was performed using the keywords; mobile phone, cell phone, and cellular phone in MEDLINE. 994 articles met the search criteria and 23 articles were identified for use of a mobile phone in a disease management telemedicine application. Five management components were identified among the 23 articles; disease management (48%), disease monitoring (14%), disease prevention (13%), diagnosis (4%), and patient education (4%). 15 different patient populations including asthma, diabetes, dementia, and hypertension were studied. Diabetes and asthma represented 11 of 23 articles, nearly 50% of patient populations studied. User compliance and satisfaction with mobile phone based healthcare applications was high for all patient populations. The feasibility of mobile phone based telemedicine applications is mostly supported by the literature review. Mobile phones possess the technical capacity and show great promise as tools for the delivery of personalized healthcare maintenance and management applications.