Background: There is growing interest in enhancing stroke self-management support using mobile health (mHealth) technology (eg, smartphones and apps). Despite this growing interest, "self-management support" is inconsistently defined and applied in the poststroke mHealth intervention literature, which limits efforts to synthesize and compare evidence. To address this gap in conceptual clarity, a scoping review was conducted.
Objective: The objectives were to (1) identify and describe the types of poststroke mHealth interventions evaluated using a randomized controlled trial design, (2) determine whether (and how) such interventions align with well-accepted conceptualizations of self-management support (the theory by Lorig and Holman and the Practical Reviews in Self-Management Support [PRISMS] taxonomy by Pearce and colleagues), and (3) identify the mHealth functions that facilitate self-management.
Methods: A scoping review was conducted according to the methodology by Arksey and O'Malley and Levac et al. In total, 7 databases were searched. Article screening and data extraction were performed by 2 reviewers. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and content analysis.
Results: A total of 29 studies (26 interventions) were included. The interventions addressed 7 focal areas (physical exercise, risk factor management, linguistic exercise, activities of daily living training, medication adherence, stroke education, and weight management), 5 types of mobile devices (mobile phones or smartphones, tablets, wearable sensors, wireless monitoring devices, and laptops), and 7 mHealth functions (educating, communicating, goal setting, monitoring, providing feedback, reminding, and motivating). Collectively, the interventions aligned well with the concept of self-management support. However, on an individual basis (per intervention), the alignment was less strong.
Conclusions: On the basis of the results, it is recommended that future research on poststroke mHealth interventions be more theoretically driven, more multidisciplinary, and larger in scale.
Keywords: chronic disease; digital health; eHealth; mHealth; mobile health; mobile phone; rehabilitation; self-management; stroke; telehealth; telemedicine.
©Alexandra N Thompson, Deirdre R Dawson, Jean Michelle Legasto-Mulvale, Nivetha Chandran, Chelsea Tanchip, Veronika Niemczyk, Jillian Rashkovan, Saisa Jeyakumar, Rosalie H Wang, Jill I Cameron, Emily Nalder. Originally published in JMIR mHealth and uHealth (https://mhealth.jmir.org), 06.12.2023.