The Use of Smartphone in Medical Practice

Is Smartphone Addiction in the Younger Population a Public Health Problem?

Problematic smartphone use and or addiction is defined as a form of behaviour characterized by the compulsive use of a smartphone that results in various forms of physical, psychological, or social harm. Global popularity in the area of the use of smartphones has raised concerns about the negative effects associated with problematic smartphone use, especially in the younger population. Having no consensual definition of smartphone addiction (SA), this behavioural addiction is based on the classic addiction symptomology that was included in DSM-5 criteria for compulsive gambling and substance abuse (APA 2013) This article provides a review of current research related to SA. Articles were found in the PUBMED database using related key words. Statistics confirm the exponential rise of this problem globally, especially in children and adolescents. Therefore, one must make this a high priority among public health issues.

Mobile Application "Neurogame" for Assessment the Attention, Focus and Concentration

Smartphones are ubiquitous, but it is still unknown what physiological functions can be monitored at clinical quality. In medicine their use is cited in many fields (cardiology, pulmology, endocrinology, rheumatology, pediatrics as well as in the field of mental health). The aim of this paper is to explain how the use of mobile application can help clients to improve the index of their focus, concentration and motor skills. Our original developed application on Android operating system, named "neurogame" is based on an open source platform to enable assessment and therapeutic stimulation, focus and concentration with the ability to monitor the progress of the results obtained in a larger number of participants (normal subjects as well as patients with different disorders) over a period of time. Whilst nowadays the predominant focus is on the pharmacological treatments, there is a rapidly growing interest in research on alternative options that will offer help in many cases of disorder management in terms of mobile application games. In order to have some kind of "norms", we evaluated a group of healthy population. Obtained results will serve as a database for comparison the future results. This article displays the results obtained as database.

Originally Adapted Mobile Application Used for Neuropsychiatric Patients

The potential use of modern mobile devices for medical purposes is huge. Digital mental health tools have mostly tended to use psycho-educational strategies based on treatment orientations developed and validated outside digital health.

The aim of this study was to test the availability of our own original app named “Neuro-game” for evaluation of reaction time in different neuropsychiatric patients. Reaction time is strongly related to the executive brain functions.

The examined sample comprised of 135 neuropsychiatric patients (with epilepsy, depression, general anxiety, psychosis and ADHD) compared with matched 50 healthy persons.

We showed that the average reaction time in neuropsychiatric patients compared with healthy people is not notably different. However, we found significant differences in total hits, total misses and total tries in the performances of ill persons.

The crucial differences in obtained scores are confirmed for age and gender issues.

The most important differences are found in the number of hits, misses and tries in the group of depressed, followed by psychotic and ADHD patients, while anxious ones showed pretty normal parameters.

All tested parameters are remarkably different for the epileptic group vs. healthy people.

The T-test for epileptic vs. healthy people showed noteworthy differences for total tries, total misses, and total hits, but the average time reaction did not differ significantly.

In comparison with other psychometric assessments, this approach by using mobile phones seemed more practical, available anywhere (not only in medical settings), less time consuming and quite interesting for all ages.