Classification of Health Related Applications

Although there is a large number of health related apps available in the stores of the major mobile platforms, the stores do not really offer clear definitions of what health related apps are and how they can be categorized. A similar picture is found in literature. Here, many proposals covering different app related aspects have been published, but often, these only cover a narrow field. There is no common terminology describing what health apps are and neither is there a common classification. In order to alleviate the situation, we developed a proposal for categorization that can be used as a basis for discussing aspects related to health applications and for describing the unclear situation on the market. In this paper, the function related aspects are covered, although the scheme itself covers many other aspects related to users of health apps, technical aspects and so on. This initial classification was applied to a sample of health apps available for iOS and Android.