Kaplan, R. M., & Stone, A. A. (2013). Bringing the laboratory and clinic to the community: Mobile technologies for health promotion and disease prevention. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 471-98.
The current authors reviewed the role of mobile technologies in the assessment of health-related behaviors, physiological responses, and self-reports. While ecological momentary assessment offers a wide range of new opportunities for ambulatory assessment and evaluation, the value of mobile technologies for interventions to improve health is less well established. Among 21 randomized clinical trials evaluating interventions that used mobile technologies, more than half failed to document significant improvements on health outcomes or health risk factors. One explanation for these disappointing results is that scientists and developers have failed to link the development of mobile intervention technologies with sound evidence-based interventions. Additional trials are needed, and evaluations of applications that are based on evidence-based principles of behavior change are strongly encouraged.