Background: Population aging brings more significant concern about how proper care will be provided to the elderly in the future. Thus, the development of technological solutions has been gaining more prominence. Joining this scenario to the growing use of mobile devices for daily activities, the following question arises: how have mobile applications for elderly health been treated in the literature? Objectives: We performed a systematic mapping conducted by health and software engineering researchers to provide an overview of studies that address mobile applications for elderly healthcare. Results: We found a total of 2533 papers and, after applying our eligibility criteria, we got 149. We observed aspects related to the digital health initiative type, using the classification proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the elderly profile prioritized by the application, the empirical validation type, and the contribution of this study to software engineering. Conclusions: The data extraction result reveals that most of the applications found in the literature focused on the independent elderly. The area of mobile applications for elderly healthcare has been increased with a higher incidence in developed countries. Regarding the WHO classification, two categories are most frequently found in the researches analyzed: Clients and Data Services. We did not find any mobile app in the Health System Manager category. We observed that most of the studies are proposals of solutions for elderly health, and the validation process generally consists of controlled experiments and usability assessments.
You can access the systematic mapping results in: Mapping Data.