Health Apps Missing the Mark: Few Target India's Heart Disease Challenge

KREMS, Austria - April 15, 2025 - PRLog -- Smartphones are changing the way people manage their health – but when it comes to heart disease in India, app stores are lagging far behind. Despite heart disease being the country's leading cause of death, accounting for over 28% of all fatalities, a now published study shows that only a tiny fraction of more than 200,000 health-related apps available in India actually addresses this urgent health issue. The research, conducted at Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences (KL Krems), involved a large-scale analysis of app store data from Apple and Google using natural language processing and clustering techniques. It showed, that very few health apps offer content in Indian languages, making them inaccessible to large segments of the population. Among the heart disease-related apps identified within the English-language pool, most are free – but they are rarely rated or reviewed, suggesting limited use. These findings highlight a major disconnect between digital health innovation and public health needs – and underscore the importance of rethinking how mobile technologies are deployed to combat serious conditions in low-resource settings.

Mobile health (mHealth) apps are often seen as a promising way to close healthcare gaps, especially in places where access to doctors or hospitals is difficult. With India's smartphone user base expected to surpass one billion, the country offers huge potential for digital health tools. But so far, scientific studies paving the way for exploiting this potential have been small or focused on narrow app categories and did not address heart disease specifically. To change this, the Division of Biomedical and Public Health Ethics at KL Krems developed a systematic and scalable method to examine what is really out there in terms of mHealth offerings– and what is lacking.

More Info here:  DOI: 10.2196/53823. https://kris.kl.ac.at/de/publications/exploring-heart-disease-related-mhealth-apps-in-india-systematic-

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