Tracking your blood sugar, heart rate or even your sleep in a few minutes and from your smartphone: this is the attractive promise, but often not or badly kept, of a growing number of health applications.
In recent years, this market has exploded worldwide to reach several hundred thousand medical applications.
Behind these figures, a wide variety of more or less elaborate devices: from the monitoring of chronic diseases to the anticipation of possible relapses of cancer, or even to the taking of medical variables, with the help or not of connected objects.
There are thus “a lot of applications which offer to follow the heart rate” thanks to a smartphone, indicates Nicolas Pagès, resuscitator anesthetist and founder of Statelia, a platform reimbursed by the French Health Insurance, which offers monitoring to patients with heart failure. .
“You just have to put your finger on the phone’s camera and it detects the pulsations from the variation of the colors,” he explains to AFP.
If this technology “works very well”, difficult to know if it is the same for other applications, he insists. “There are some that are totally wacky” and “what is difficult is to find your way around, to differentiate serious applications from those that are not”.
Because beautiful promises are often built on wind, he warns. The vast majority of applications downloadable by the general public have in fact not proven their effectiveness.
A study conducted by a French team and published in July in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) shed light on this problem. Of 68 French applications analyzed, 64% had not carried out any relevant clinical study before marketing.
And only 21% had carried out a randomized study, an experimental protocol intended to measure their effectiveness. In particular because they have a cost – several tens of thousands of euros – and are not made compulsory.
“There is not the same circuit for an application in medicine as for the drug circuit for example”, regrets Rémi Sabatier, cardiologist and vice-president of the National Institute of e-health, which seeks to structure this ecosystem. .
“There have been applications that offered a voltage measurement and which were completely bogus,” he notes. Which is “very annoying because the people who used them thought they were monitoring their blood pressure”, and were therefore put in danger.
Another risk is that of securing very sensitive health data. “For the moment, it’s a bit of the wild west”, regrets Vincent Trely, founding president of the Association for the Security of Health Information Systems.
Most of the apps are free. However, “if it’s free, you are the product”, he explains, with “the sole objective of collecting mass data” to resell it.
However, not all applications should be put in the same basket. There is a real difference between those related to well-being and those purely medical, point out the specialists, even if “the border is sometimes tenuous and the legislation leaves everyone the choice to say where they are”, notes Rémi Sabatier.
Thus, the “applications promoted by doctors” are “reliable”, assures Vincent Trely, but are very few. Scientifically validated, most of them offer the monitoring of cardiac or chronic pathologies such as diabetes.
