Elsevier

Burns

Volume 41, Issue 5, August 2015, Pages 977-989
Burns

Smartphone applications in burns

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.burns.2014.11.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Out of >1,000,000 applications (apps) in Google Play Store, we identified 32 apps for the treatment of burns, of which 20 were calculation apps (eight for estimating the total body surface area (TBSA) and nine for total fluid requirement (TFR)).

  • In Apple's App Store, under the category of medicine, 39 apps were related to burns, of which 21 were calculation apps.

  • Our study showed a correlation of the calculated TFR in six out of 12 free available calculation apps.

  • The review demonstrated that there are many apps for medical burns available in both common app stores. Even free available calculation apps may provide a more objective and reproducible procedure compared to manual/subjective estimations.

Abstract

Objective

Since the introduction of applications (apps) for smartphones, the popularity of medical apps has been rising. The aim of this review was to demonstrate the current availability of apps related to burns on Google's Android and Apple's iOS store as well as to include a review of their developers, features, and costs.

Methods

A systematic online review of Google Play Store and Apple's App Store was performed by using the following search terms: “burn,” “burns,” “thermal,” and the German word “Verbrennung.” All apps that were programmed for use as medical apps for burns were included. The review was performed from 25 February until 1 March 2014. A closer look at the free and paid calculation apps including a standardized patient was performed.

Results

Four types of apps were identified: calculators, information apps, book/journal apps, and games. In Google Play Store, 31 apps were related to burns, of which 20 were calculation apps (eight for estimating the total body surface area (TBSA) and nine for total fluid requirement (TFR)). In Apple's App Store, under the category of medicine, 39 apps were related to burns, of which 21 were calculation apps (19 for estimating the TBSA and 17 for calculating the TFR). In 19 out of 32 available calculation apps, our study showed a correlation of the calculated TFR compared to our standardized patient.

Conclusion

The review demonstrated that many apps for medical burns are available in both common app stores. Even free available calculation apps may provide a more objective and reproducible procedure compared to manual/subjective estimations, although there is still a lack of data security especially in personal data entered in calculation apps. Further clinical studies including smartphone apps for burns should be performed.

Introduction

Since the introduction of smartphones by the “Stockholm Smartphone Team” [1] in 1997, the term smartphone has become common in our daily lives. Nowadays, a smartphone is synonymous with a device, which associates the properties of a mobile phone with the possibilities of a personal computer. Another historic milestone of the smartphone was the introduction of the first touch screen [1] on mobile devices in 2000. Heather Leonhard of the “Business Insider” expects that there will be 1.4 billion smartphone users worldwide at the end of 2014, indicating that nearly every fifth human being on the planet will possibly own one [2]. Most smartphones run on Google's operating system Android (60%) followed by Apple's iOS (40%) [2]. In 2008, both Apple and Google introduced their application (app) stores, which have made it easy for users to individualize their mobile devices. From 2008 until July 2011, 15 billion apps were downloaded from the Apple's App Store [3]. Google Play Store, formerly Android Market from Google, hosts more than one million apps to date [4]. About half of these apps have become available in Apple's App Store [3]. The widespread penetration of smartphones in the population has, of course, had an effect on the way in which we interact in our professional and private daily lives: smartphones are supposed to be used more often than personal computers, laptops, or even pen and paper.

Even in daily clinical practice, electronic devices form an integral part of modern medicine. These devices may help guide patient care in hospitals, they may help find the right diagnosis, and they are sometimes helpful in therapeutic decision making. All these properties can be provided by different devices or they can be included in one system. Nowadays, custom-made apps for smartphones and their users are able to assume a majority, if not all, of these tasks. Therefore, modern app stores have special categories for medical/health-care apps. In the medical literature, a growing number of authors described the continuous rise in the popularity of smartphone apps [5], [6], [7], [8]. Mosa et al. [5] described that most apps in medicine are used for disease diagnosis, medical calculations, or drug references. To enable special apps for every field of medicine, numerous different apps for almost every medical specialty have been made available. Most are free for download and some are to be purchased.

In the treatment of burns, many different apps have been on offer ranging from first-aid leaflets, literature and papers, or games to calculation apps.

The aim of this study was to review the offered apps applicable in the treatment of burns on Google's Android and Apple's iOS smartphones and to focus on the following parameters: costs (free/paid), developers, content, target groups (medical professionals/laypersons), and available interfaces (e.g., hospital information system/HIS). Furthermore, we compared all available calculation apps in a study based on a standardized patient model.

Section snippets

Ethics

A formal ethical review board approval was not required, because we did not use any personal or patient data.

Design

A systematic review of the two provided app stores was performed from 25 February until 1 March 2014. The terms for research were defined: “burn,” “burns,” “thermal,” and the German word “Verbrennung.” At first, the terms were searched in Google Play Store (formerly Android Market) by using the following link: https://play.google.com/store/apps. As a second step, Apple's App Store was

Results

Detailed results of the available apps are described in Table 1 (for Google's Android) and Table 2 (for Apple's iOS). The research process is illustrated in two flowcharts (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). In every store, we could identify four types of apps: calculators, information, books/journals, and games. Thirty-two calculator apps (13 for Android, 21 for iOS, and two of the same name in both stores) usually provide functionality both for estimating the TBSA and for calculating the TFR, whereas some apps

Discussion

We have supplied within this review an overview of apps for burns. The daily rising demand of medical apps for smartphones has a strong impact on finding the “right” app for orderly medical decisions. Van Velsen et al. [9] mentioned an app overload in the context of health care. In addition, we compared all free available calculation apps with a patient model. This comparison showed that 19 apps provide comparable and reliable results by the TFR calculation (Table 3, Table 4). Furthermore, our

Conclusion

Overall, there are some helpful apps available for burns in both app stores, although there is still a lack of data security especially for calculation apps. Many of them may provide support in daily medical decisions and, of course, allow a continuous collection of data. Our study of free calculation apps showed that most of the calculated TFRs correlate. The benefit of an accurate and objective estimation of the burned TBSA and, furthermore, an optimized fluid resuscitation is

Conflict of interest statement

N/A.

Funding

We want to thank the Austrian Burn Treatment, Research and Prevention Study Group (ABUSG) for the funding of the paid calculation apps www.abusg.com.

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    These authors contributed equally to this work.

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