| خلاصه مقاله | Background: Digital technologies such as mobile apps are essential tools for improving the health and basic services provided to the population
Objective: The purpose of this study was to identifying the key features of Iranian mobile apps developed in the COVID-19 pandemic
Material and Methods: A systematic search with keywords consists of ‘COVID’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘corona’ individually was done to identify smartphone applications related to the COVID-19 available on Iranian major mobile apps platforms. For each app, the information extracted consisted of the name, category of the app, cost size, version, need for Internet connection, subscriber count download, developers and purpose.
Results: The search results included a total of 103 apps. Of these, 73.7% (n=76) were pertained to Android, and 26.3 % (n=27) to iOS. The most frequent categories were medical (41.7%), game (17.5%) and Educational (10.7%) apps. About 80% of apps (n=83) were free, whereas 15% (n =16) were in-app purchasing and 4% of apps (n=4) need payment. personal developers with 48% (n=49), private companies with 35% (n=34) and government with 9.7 % (n=10) were most frequent of developers. Approximately 82% (n=84) of apps need internet connection for usages
Conclusion: Mobile apps have various beneficial functions in healthcare and more development of mobile health apps represent the change in the provision of health services towards online services in Iranian society. Mobile app patient tracking and outbreak monitoring can help manage the disease. Identifying the key features of mobile apps and the needs of Iranian users requires more detailed studies. |