ORIGINAL PAPER How trustworthy are apps for maternal and child health? Karen M. Scott & Gastao A. Gome & Deborah Richards & Patrina H. Y. Caldwell Received: 25 August 2014 /Accepted: 24 February 2015 /Published online: 12 March 2015 # IUPESM and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Abstract Mobile technologies have become important tools for promoting and implementing healthcare. A key feature of smartphones and tablet computers is their ability to run soft- ware applications (apps), which can address specific health- related areas, including maternal and child health; however, there is little independent regulation or guidance for the de- velopment and publication of health apps in many countries, including Australia. This research examined health apps in two major app stores (Google and Apple) that address mater- nal and child health. Ten free maternal and child health apps available in Google and Apple stores were examined to eval- uate their trustworthiness and technical performance. This was determined based on evidence of health professional involve- ment and use of evidence-based medical content, as well as an evaluation of functionality, usability and security. Only four of the ten apps examined were developed with the involvement of health professionals and four provided information from evidence-based medical content. Significantly, only four were fully functional, two were fully usable and three adequately implemented security mechanisms to guarantee privacy of user data. Two of the apps were inoperative. In conclusion, this study found great variation in the quality of content, func- tionality and security of ten maternal and child health apps. These results suggest developers, owners and health providers should work to improve maternal and child health apps, con- sumers need help to determine the trustworthiness of health apps, and sponsors and regulators should establish standards and endorse compliant health apps. Keywords mHealth . Applications . Apps . Mobile . Maternal . Children 1 Introduction The use of mobile devices for the delivery of health is becom- ing increasingly widespread and an important part of healthcare [1, 2]. Mobile health (mHealth) can be delivered through a range of mobile devices, such as tablet computers, mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other wireless devices [3]. Smartphones and tablet computers are an attractive means of delivering health interventions because of their computational power, fast internet-access, portability and price [2], widespread adoption and the tendency of owners to keep them nearby at all times [1]. Smartphones have been used by healthcare providers to give information to pregnant and new mothers through text messaging [4] and phone calls [5], measure adolescents’ asth- ma symptoms and adherence to treatment through an interac- tive voice response system [6] and as an e-Diary for children and adolescents with sickle cell disease [7]. An important aim of mHealth is to improve patient care in locations where at- tention from health professionals is expensive, unavailable or irregular, thus providing access to previously unreachable populations [8–10]. Cloud computing is enhancing this through the use of complex services on less capable or cheaper devices [3]. K. M. Scott (*) : P. H. Y. Caldwell Discipline of Paediatrics and Child Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: karen.scott@health.nsw.gov.au G. A. Gome : D. Richards Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia P. H. Y. Caldwell The Children’ s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, Australia Health Technol. (2014) 4:329–336 DOI 10.1007/s12553-015-0099-x