More than 100,00 lifestyle and wellbeing apps are available. These apps can potentially contribute to the empowerment of patients by for example help manage ones health more actively, live more independently thanks to self-assessment or remote monitoring solutions. However, there is no clear evidence on their quality and reliability.
This has raised concerns about the ability of consumers to assess their usefulness, thus potentially limiting their effective uptake for the benefit of public health.
To counter this the European Commission has launched a call for expression of interest to appoint organisations as members of a working group on mHealth (=Mobile Health) assessment guidelines. The mandate of the group is to develop guidelines for assessing the validity and reliability of the data that health apps collect and process.
Organisations will be appointed as members, which in turn will nominate their representatives.
The expert group will be active until it develops and endorses the guidelines. The guidelines are expected to be finalised by the end of 2016.
Vice-Chancellor: “We believe that Professor Carlbring will be an excellent asset to the working group on mHealth assessment guidelines.”
Yesterday the Vice-Chancellor nominated me to the representative in the European Commission Expert Group mHealth.