Background: Information and communications technologies are transforming our social interactions and life-styles. One of the most promising applications of information technology is healthcare and wellness management that characterized by early detection of conditions, prevention, and long-term healthcare management.
Objective: The main purpose of this document is to do a study, first about the actual literature about mobile phone applications to measure and control heart-rate and second a study about these applications themselves, analyzing the different app stores more popular nowadays, Google Play Store and iTunes (for Android and iOS devices respectively).
Methods: The Web portals and databases that were used to perform the searches are IEEE Xplore, National Center for Biotechnology Information, Springer, ResearchGate, Science Direct and Scopus, taking into account the date of publication from 2010 to 2018, publications in English and Spanish.
Results: 40 relevant papers have been found related to mobile phone apps to measure and control heart rate. The results show that of a total of 400 applications found 61.25% of them are in the Play Store (Android systems) and the remaining 38.75% were found in the iTunes Store (iOS systems).
Conclusions: From the review of the research articles analyzed, it can be said that the most applications found are for Android devices. They occupy 76.53% of the world mobile phone market, while iOS only owns 18.97%.
Keywords: Android; Heart-rate; Mobile apps; Photoplethysmogram; iOS.