Aplicativos móveis em saúde e nutrição: uma visão abrangente

Abstract

The objective of the present work was to identify, in national and international publications indexed in the main databases, the characteristics adopted in the development of mobile health and nutrition applications. An integrative literature review was carried out by searching the PubMed, Scielo, Lilacs and Periódicos Capes databases, articles published from 2010 to 2020 covering texts in English, Spanish or Portuguese. The results demonstrate that most of the applications were directed to patients and aimed to educate / inform or search for information regarding food and healthy lifestyle, closely related to the area of nutrition. The articles dealt with application development and testing. As for the technical characteristics, it was found that the most important ones referred to personalization according to users, easy to understand language, easy to use interface, adequate architecture for easy identification of what should be clicked and using few clicks. What facilitated the use of the applications was the accessibility / clarity, simplicity and motivation that it presents to the user. The main difficulty was the heterogeneous availability of internet access. Such characteristics are considered important, as they can promote improvements and adaptations in mobile applications related to health and nutrition, so that the system is focused on the user and satisfies their needs.