Can apps really help us to live healthily?

On a health kick? There's an app for that. Whether you want to improve your diet, up your step count, or work out more, downloading an app can be one way of helping you reach your goal — or at least make it feel more reachable.

According to a new study, though, downloading such apps might actually be doing more than just making us feel on the ball with our health goals. Analysing the results of nearly 50 studies on online health interventions, a global team finds that on the whole, apps can offer significant improvements in various health-related behaviours.

The team selected 47 eligible studies with a total of 206,873 participants. Of these studies, some looked at e-health interventions on diet, some on sleep, and others on physical activity, while the majority looked at combined behaviours. Key areas of focus were daily step count, physical activity, consumption of fruit and veg, calorie count, weight, and sleep quality.

Interventions themselves included a mixture of different kinds of programmes. These could be mobile apps, in which people track health activity on their phones, text messages, through which people are encouraged to engage in particular types of behaviour, as well as browser-based programmes and downloadable software.

The team's analyses found that such programmes had a significant impact on health-related behaviours. Overall physical activity increased by an average of 44.8 minutes per week when enrolled in an online health intervention; moderate to vigorous physical activity increased by 55 minutes per week. Step count, another important factor in physical health, increased by an average of 1329 steps per day, while time spent sedentary decreased by an impressive 426 minutes (7 hours) a week.

The apps studied produced an impact on diet and weight, too. On average, fruit and vegetable intake increased by 0.5 servings per day, fat consumption decreased by 5.5g per day, and calorie consumption by 103 calories per day. Over the course of the interventions, average reduction in weight was 1.89kg (or 4lbs). Impacts on the quality of sleep were also observed, with insomnia severity significantly decreasing and sleep quality increasing, indicating improvements in each area of health looked at by the team.

Overall, the study suggests that app-based interventions can have a significant impact on health. The team did not explore exactly which factors lead to improvements in this particular study — with such a broad range of interventions, it is likely that different mechanisms were at play with different apps. Understanding these mechanisms in more detail could provide more insight into why exactly certain interventions work better than others, and for who.

Read the paper in full:

Singh, B., Ahmed, M., Staiano, A. E., Gough, C., Petersen, J., Vandelanotte, C., Kracht, C., Huong, C., Yin, Z., Vasiloglou, M. F., Pan, C.-C., Short, C. E., Mclaughlin, M., von Klinggraeff, L., Pfledderer, C. D., Moran, L. J., Button, A. M., & Maher, C. A. (2024). A systematic umbrella review and meta-meta-analysis of eHealth and mHealth interventions for improving lifestyle behaviours. Npj Digital Medicine, 7(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-024-01172-y