A/Prof Farah Magrabi, Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University.
Mobile apps are increasingly being used to engage consumers to participate in their healthcare. The number of health apps has soared in the past few years with around 165,000 currently available in the Apple iTunes and Android app stores. Despite their growing use, the safety of health apps is poorly understood amongst researchers and continues to be a neglected policy area. SafeHealthApps is an incident-reporting study to engage with users of health apps, to identify and report safe risks. This study is the first in the world to undertake a nation-wide examination of safety risk involving the use of health apps by consumers.
Ethics approval has been granted through the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee.
