Self-care and apps, change agents to overweight, obesity and diabetes diseases

Abstract

The most frequent diseased in Mexico are: overweight, obesity and diabetes. Medical services to deal with diabetes are expensive and insufficient. Self-care emerges as an option for patients, encouraging them to take responsibility for their illness. Self-care implies for the patient a change of habits in terms of food, physical activity and rest. In the field of application development to health, we note an increasing number of mobile applications that are proposed to support different aspects of self-care. In this article, we present a classification of mobile applications that support self-care in overweight, obesity and diabetes. This classification is based on two aspects: a) purpose of the application and b) main functionalities. We found the purpose of the application can be: nutrition and diet, measurement of physiological parameters, physical activity, medication taking, medical appointments and social activity. We found functionalities can be: personalized monitoring, providing information and remembering activities.

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