Mobile-Health (Medical Applications)

Security Aspects

In considering that mobile products incorporating clinical-decision support, there is a strong need of FDA supervision in order to protect the public health, sustain consumer confidence in mHealth products and encourage appropriate control.
Majority of mHealth Products are safe to use but some evidences indicates through independent evaluation that some apps do not works as claimed or they make mistakes. In 2012, Sanofi Aventis recalled its diabetes app because it was miscalculating insulin doses, which might lead to dangerously low or high blood glucose levels in diabetics.

The FDA’s true challenge is creating an administrative framework in order to prevent the market from being overloaded with products that are ineffective or unsafe with in house technical proficiency to supervise proceeding chain of mHealth products by approval fee for mHealth products like user fees for drugs; to achieve its attempt, the FDA may need to dedicate a center or office to control mobile applications and other software devices (Hamel, Cortez, Cohen, and Kesselheim, 2014, p.379). As mHealth products become more global and ambitious, FDA supervision will aid to preserve the public health, support user’s confidence in mHealth products, and encourage high-value innovations.

Ethical and social aspects

As it seems, smartphone applications have positive effects in our health life but they might have some ethical issues for elderly people who doesn’t have a technical knowledge to work with new technologies or even people who can’t afford to have one.
Simultaneously digital technology briefly mHealth is not exciting to everyone. “many health care providers express concerns about the idea of patients tracking their own clinical measurements” said Steven Steinhubl, director of Digital Medicine at the Scripps Translational Science Institute (Mone, 2014, p.20). They worry these devices could have a negative impact on the doctor-patient relationship, and that doctors will end up seeing their patients even less than they do today.

Some other concerns come with patients not knowing what to do with the bulk of data they collect, and that all these numbers could increase tension rather than health. On the other hand, doctors would be confused about how to deal with all that information as well.
Some other ethical issues come with elderly or individuals without advanced technical skills in new technologies. While smartphone devices remain flexible to participate patients via written, spoken (text-to-speech technologies such as the iPhone's Siri), or even video interactions, there is a need to consider required level of literacy to use text and apps within this population.
For low income users, mobile user society and the worldwide deployment of mobile and wireless networks and the wireless infrastructure in health care are able to provide healthcare to anyone, anytime, and anywhere without constraints of location or time.