An evaluation of smartphone apps for preventive healthcare focusing on cardiovascular disease

Chronic/non-communicable diseases cause millions of deaths every year. These include heart diseases, diabetes, cancer and other diseases which are caused due to various factors such as lack of physical activity, improper diet, long-term smoking effects, and many more. However most of these diseases are preventable. Such diseases mostly affect developing or low income countries due to lack of regular health monitoring system or proper management. Smartphone devices are currently being used in developed countries to overcome this issue and help people monitor their own health and change their lifestyle to avoid such illness. Throughout the world there are currently around 2.16 billion Smartphone users. Smartphone apps have become the trending technology globally due to their affordability and mobility. Healthcare apps also known as preventive healthcare apps, can help people maintain their lifestyle and health so as to prevent any future sickness. In this study our objective is to evaluate currently available healthcare journals, articles and top rated preventive healthcare apps. With the help of this review we were able to classify the different types of healthcare apps and we also proposed an app for cardiovascular disease (CVD). To observe people's feedback of our proposal we conducted a survey on 100 people. This study also emphasizes the importance of preventive healthcare apps for developing countries such as Bangladesh.