More than a million health and wellness apps are available from Apple and Google app stores, with more being added daily. With so many health related apps to choose from, how can you decide which ones you would like to use and how they might improve your health?

First, consider what kind of app you’re looking for. Overall, you can divide health-related apps into four broad categories: general health and wellness apps, apps that help manage your general health or specific chronic condition, telehealth and telemedicine apps, and the largest category new, digital therapeutics apps, approved by the FDA for use in the treatment of certain conditions.

“Our day-to-day behaviors drive most of our risk for disease and its associated costs,” said Daniel Kraft, MD, founder and chair of Explanatory Medicine, a program that explores emerging technologies and their potential in medicine and healthcare. . “And we now have an explosion of new equipment to help measure and improve our healthy behavior. The first Fitbit was only launched in 2009, and wearable outfits are now ubiquitous and can measure almost every aspect of our activity, physiology, and even mental health. ”

Health and Wellbeing apps

The wide variety of general health and wellness apps available include nutritional apps like LoseIt and MyFitnessPal which help you track your eating and exercise habits and weight loss, fitness apps like Strava, Fitplan, and Aaptiv, trackers sleep like Sleep Cycle, and mental wellness apps. like Calm, Headspace, and Happify.

“As wearables evolve to become quite commonly used by most people, many wellness apps like these can communicate with your wearable clothing,” says healthcare futurist Rafael Grossman, MD, a surgeon at the District Hospital Portsmouth in New Hampshire performed the first Google Glass surgery. “And data from those third-party apps can be aggregated seamlessly in your Apple Health Kit or Google Fit, to give you a complete report on your health and activity, all in one place.”

Health Management Apps

These apps usually offer general health management tools such as medication trackers and reminders, as well as disease-specific functions such as tracking blood glucose for people with diabetes or reporting bleeding events for people with hemophilia. Many of these apps can also be set up to share information directly with your doctor.

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If you are looking for an app to help you manage a particular chronic condition, start by asking the treating doctor about that condition. Another good source of recommendations would be with national organizations that advocate for people with your condition. For example, My MS Manager is a free mobile application created by the American Multiple Sclerosis Society (MSAA) that allows users to track their MS symptoms, create reports for medical professionals, and obtain medication reminders.

If you are being cared for in a large hospital or medical center, they may have one or more apps of their own that help you manage your visits, prescriptions and electronic health record. Many health insurance companies also offer apps for patients enrolled in one of their schemes that allow them to manage their health benefits with a few taps and swipes, and even incentivize healthy behavior by offering rewards such as gift cards .

Many of these apps can also integrate with wearable technologies like Fitbit or Apple Watch, or with other home digital health devices like blood pressure cuffs, smart thermometers, and smart scales. “Apps are now fusing with home diagnostic platforms,” ​​says Kraft. “Partly because of the need for more remote healthcare visits to COVID, people have become more comfortable with using things like associated blood pressure cuffs and pulse oximeters. The great value is to help you manage disease processes intelligently, especially chronic ones. “

Telehealth and Telemedicine Apps

Apps like Doctor on Demand, Teladoc, GoodRx Care, Talkspace, and Zocdoc can connect you directly to a doctor for a virtual appointment or help you search and book local healthcare providers for personal visits. More and more hospitals and health systems, such as the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, are also incorporating the ability to participate in virtual visits in their own apps.

“The pandemic accelerated the use of virtual visits dramatically, and I don’t think we will ever go back to pre-pandemic levels of personal healthcare visits, as patients and doctors find convenience and compelling effectiveness,” he said Kraft. “Even before virtual Zoom or FaceTime with clinicians, we’ve always had smarter chatbots that can help detect symptoms and triage problems through apps like these effectively at a lower cost.”

Digital Therapeutics Apps

In 2017, the FDA approved the first flood of new digital therapeutics for treating diseases, a program called reSET from Pear Therapeutics, which uses mobile assessments and interventions to treat substance use disorders. It has been followed by more than 200 others to date, including BlueStar, a personalized training app that has been found to lower blood glucose levels for adults living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, and Kaia Health, a physical therapy app that has been shown in clinical trials to significantly reduce pain, anxiety, stress and depression in people with musculoskeletal pain.

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“We are now in an era where the hardware and software has evolved into an ecosystem, with apps, smartphones, wearable costumes, and AI algorithms,” said Grossmann. “This gives us better solutions and more personalized recommendations for behavior changes that make medical sense and can produce real improvements in health.”

Kraft anticipates that your doctor will soon prescribe an app rather than, or in addition to, a new medication or other form of treatment. “It’s a golden age for these digital solutions,” he said. “There are so many options available to help you maximize your physical and mental wellbeing, diagnose illnesses before they become significant, or manage complex diseases ranging from pneumonia to cancer.”