Breaking Barriers: Mobile Health Interventions for Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading global cause of death and morbidity and prevention needs to be strengthened to tackle this. Mobile health (mHealth) might present a novel and effective solution in CVD prevention, and interest in mHealth has grown dramatically since the advent of the smartphone. In this review, we discuss mHealth interventions that target multiple cardiovascular risk factors simultaneously in the context of primary as well as secondary prevention. There is some evidence that mHealth interventions improve a range of individual CVD risk factors, but a relative paucity of evidence on mHealth interventions improving multiple CVD risk factors simultaneously. The existing data suggest mHealth programs improve overall CVD risk, at least in the short term. Interpretation of the evidence is difficult in the context of poor methodology and mHealth modalities often being a part of large complex interventions. In this review we identify a number of unanswered questions including: which mode of mHealth (or combination of interventions) would be most effective, what is the durability of intervention effects, and what degree of personalization and interactivity is required.