In a recent study, a group of Australian researchers catalogued the health apps available for a variety of mental health conditions every day for 9 months to better understand the “half-life” of mental health apps.
Health apps have been recognized as a way to potentially deliver therapy and support for patients with mental health conditions. We’ve seen a variety of applications, such as the use of virtual reality for depression and phobias.
While there may be some potentially effective mental health apps on the horizon, we’ve covered the problems with poor quality in terms of the apps patients are finding now. In this study, researchers took a closer look at what exactly our patients are finding when they turn to the app store for support in dealing with mental health conditions.
They searched iTunes and Android using keywords for depression, suicide, and bipolar disorder every day for 9 months, cataloguing what they found. If an app they’d previously seen didn’t show up on a recent search, they checked to see if the app was still on the market.
They found that over 9 months, 50% of the apps they found when searching for those terms changed between 115 days – 195 days for Android. For iOS, it turns out that the number never dropped less than 50% in the study period. In other words, the iOS mental health app market seemed to be less in flux than the Android market.
When looking more closely at depression apps, they found 623 and 359 apps in the Android and iOS markets respectively. As far as relevance, they found that 32% of Android apps and 42% of iOS apps were actually relevant to depression. And the bar for relevance was low – clinical validity wasn’t part of that assessment.
This study offers some interesting insights into how the health app market is evolving. We often describe it as a fairly fast moving space but it would seem that may be more true of Android than iOS. A lot of that probably has to do with the lower barrier to entry into Android for health apps. It also reminds us that finding useful health apps remains a needle in a haystack problem for patients.
