A Taxonomy of mHealth Apps -- Security and Privacy Concerns

With the increasing use of smartphones for healthcare purposes, more and more people now share their personal healthcare information using a variety of applications. The vast number of existing mobile health (mHealth) applications creates a serious problem for users, as often times they are unaware of how their data are managed and used. We propose a taxonomy incorporating the most significant security and privacy aspects of mHealth applications. This artifact can help outline some of the problems related to creating and downloading mHealth applications. The taxonomy was tested with 38 top-rated Android and iOS healthcare applications. Results of the evaluation suggest that having a unified mechanism to categorize mHealth applications with respect to security and privacy is important and can be beneficial. This study contributes to literature, as it builds upon prior work and adds knowledge to a still new and relatively unexplored domain such as mobile healthcare.