OBJECTIVES: mHealth applications have emerged as tools for delivering health-related services in cancer. This research aims to examine trends in the use of mHealth applications in cancer in literature.

METHODS: Articles on the use of mHealth applications were extracted from PubMed® using the query, ‘cancer [MeSH] AND smartphone [MeSH]’. No limitation on publication date was imposed. Articles published in languages other than English and related to animal models were excluded. After manual review of the abstracts, studies that assessed use of an mHealth application via a smartphone, tablet or wearable were retained. Trends in keywords and MeSH terms in the resulting set of abstracts were analyzed using Topictracker, a Python™ pipeline to search, download and explore PubMed entries.

RESULTS: Total number of articles retained after inclusion and exclusion criteria were analyzed for trends in use of an mHealth application in cancer (n=140). All studies were published between 2013 and 2022, most publications published in 2020 (n=30).

On examining the frequency of MeSH terms, more common relevant terms included ‘smartphones’ (40% of the studies), ‘surveys and questionnaires’(11.4%), ‘mobile applications’ (7.8%). MeSH terms including ‘fitness trackers’, ‘wearable electronic devices’, ‘early detection of cancer’, ‘severity of illness index’, ‘early diagnosis’ was included in a few studies (1.4%). There was an increasing trend of use of the above MeSH terms over the years, particularly from 2017 through 2022. Co-occurrence analysis of MeSH terms showed that ‘female’ and ‘smartphone’ appeared in more publications (n=20.7%) compared to ‘male’ and ‘smartphone’ (14.2%).

Similarly, relevant common keywords included ‘smartphone(s)’ (12.8%), ‘mobile health'/'mobile applications'/'digital health’ (7.1%), ‘breast cancer’ (4.3%), ‘mobile health’ (2.8%), ‘mobile applications', 'digital health' (2.1%), ‘skin cancer’, ‘mhealth’ and ‘melanoma' (1.4%).

CONCLUSIONS: There is an increase in the use of mHealth applications in cancer care in recent years. These applications are mainly used for diagnosis and detection.