Authors:
Joana Muchagata
and
Ana Ferreira
Affiliation:
CINTESIS - Center for Health Technology and Services Research, Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto and Portugal
Keyword(s):
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), mHealth Apps, Dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
e-Health
;
Health Information Systems
;
ICT, Ageing and Disability
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
Mobile apps have the potential to improve the overall patients and caregivers’ quality of life and, particularly, of those with dementia. The ability to stimulate cognitive functions, keep the brain active and helping people to be as independent as possible in their daily lives are considered highly valued characteristics. But despite those advantages, there is a lack of security standards and guidelines focused on mobile apps and the general sense is that those provide low or no privacy/security and commonly do not comply with current regulations. We analysed eighteen apps with the ability to stimulate cognitive functions for people with dementia to verify if they were GDPR compliant. Results show that most analysed apps (78%) do not provide any information regarding how personal data are processed, and if they do, this is not clear. Also, users’ consent to allow that processing is rarely sought (11%). In conclusion, GDPR mandated requirements are still not implemented in most of th
e analysed mental health apps to ensure privacy and security in the interactions between users and mobile apps. This work intends to bring awareness to this issue to both researchers and developers, especially in the area of healthcare and mental health.
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