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| Health App Downloads Soar, But Do They Work? Adam Kaufman Interviewed as expert |
| Written by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer |
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Measuring success: Is there an app for that? Meeting guidelines is one thing, but successfully changing behavior is another. There haven't been any studies of the efficacy of apps. That's mostly because the pace of academic research lags behind the pace of consumer technology, said Adam Kaufman, the president of DPS Health in Los Angeles, a company that contracts with insurance agencies and doctors' offices to develop support programs for patients. "It takes three to six months to build these [apps]," Kaufman told LiveScience. "It takes six to 15 months minimum to run a study and it takes a year to publish a study, so if the first iPhone is two to three years old, you would just be seeing the first iPhone study. If you started a study a couple years ago, the Droid phones weren't even out." (The first iPhone was released in 2007, and the first Android phones came out in late 2008.) App developers keep their own statistics, but it's tough to know how active consumers were before they downloaded a new weight-loss program. The MeYou Health app Monumental, which tracks users' stair-climbing and maps it onto virtual landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, has a return-user rate of about 30 percent, said company spokesperson Alicia Benjamin. (Collectively, Monumental users have climbed 397,000 stairs since the program was released in October 2010, she said.) But even if people drop one app, it's impossible to know if they've picked up another. Cooper, who now relies on the Weight Watchers and Couch to 5K programs, said she tried several diet and exercise apps before she settled on two that she likes. Kaufman's company developed a Web tool called Virtual Lifestyle Management, designed to help people with diabetes or at risk for the disease track and improve their health. The program, which is based on National Institutes of Health guidelines, has been Web-based but is moving toward text and other mobile applications, Kaufman said. "The real challenge in weight loss or any behavior change is not that initial period of high motivation," Kaufman said. "It's how do you extend that so it actually becomes a lasting change over time." Making apps better Unfortunately, Kaufman said, changing bad habits is hard work, which doesn't always mesh with the fun-and-games style of for-profit apps. Kaufman sees the most useful apps as the ones linked to real-world support, such as a clinician or dietician who reviews your exercise logs and then makes recommendations based on the information entered. Click Here to read the entire article |
