A review on diabetes patient lifestyle management using mobile application

Diabetes is a silent-killer disease that highly demands proper patient care and sound self-management which is a major challenge for a patient. The advancement in ICT and the rapid increase of mobile phone users are showing that lifestyle management of a diabetes patient can be guided using mobile application. The objective of this review is to analyze the articles and the existing mobile apps that are currently available to support diabetes patient and based on the analysis to describe the opportunities for developing a mobile app integrating most of the common features required for the self-management of a diabetic patient. The review covers journal databases for articles and online markets for mobile app. Initially we found 273 articles from the journal databases and 1004 apps from the online markets out of which 29 articles and 43 apps satisfied our selection criteria. We successfully brought out five primary and seven secondary features which can efficiently handle the self-management system. The major features include blood glucose monitor, medication, diet plan, physical activity, automated transfer of blood glucose data, SMS based notification, weight management, communication etc. No app in our review is found satisfying all the features. Since all the primary and secondary features as a whole are very essential for an effective diabetes patient lifestyle management, but not available in a single app, so there is a potential scope to develop such an app integrating all the features very efficiently.