The era of tailored mHealth

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that we introduce the first issue of the fifth volume of the Journal with a diverse range of papers that illustrate the broad engagement of mobile health technologies to target the spectrum of socioeconomic groups in society. Currently the mHealth developers stand at the precipice of the greatest rate in growth of mHealth related apps. Results published in the mhealth App Developer Economics Survey in 2015 showed that the number of mHealth apps has now exceeded 165,000. However, with only 5 per cent of apps being developed from Africa and South America combined (compared to 72% from Europe and North America) there clearly remains a challenge in developing and implementing apps for low-resource settings.