Monitoring Older Adults’ Health Information Using Mobile Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Mobile health technologies are becoming more common to assist older people in independent living and self-management of illnesses. Although many mobile health technologies can be beneficial to older users, there remains a dearth of evidence-informed guidance to develop such technologies. The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review to (1) determine which types of mobile health technologies have been used to monitor health in older adults, (2) determine whether these devices allow older users to visualize their data and to complement automatically gathered sensor information with subjective information or data from other sources, and (3) determine which health information about older adults is usually monitored. We performed a focused systematic literature review of the ACM Digital Library database, including papers specifically assessing the implementation of mobile health technologies (e.g., wearables), and other mobile computerized equipment for independent older adults. Our results show that the most commonly used device is the smartphone, that the monitored data is usually acceleration, heart rate and position, and that only 30.4% of studies evaluate devices for older adults with older adult participants.

Keywords

• mhealth
• monitoring
• mobile
• wearable
• sensor
• health
• older