Mobile health applications for self-regulation of glucose levels in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients: a systematic review

Background
As diabetes incidence continues to rise, active medical intervention and self-management have now become crucial. Evidence showed that diabetes patients are at high risk of developing complications. Self-care management is of utmost importance when it comes to diabetes care. Recent situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, however, have restricted vital communications between diabetes patients and their caregivers. This factor significantly deteriorates the glycaemic control of diabetes patients. At this point, mobile health applications can tackle the mentioned problems.

Objectives
This article aims to investigate the recent developments in mobile applications for diabetes care. We also discuss the effectiveness of mobile health in controlling blood glucose levels through self-care for diabetes patients, especially during the pandemic.

Material and methods
We present a review derived from articles published in the last 8 years. We extensively searched major databases for articles related to mobile health applications for diabetes care.

Results
We found that mobile health applications are effective in diabetes self-management. Appropriate health applications enable communications be-tween patients and caregivers/medical professionals at a distance, minimising the need for physical interactions during difficult circumstances. Via applications, patients can now maintain their healthy lifestyle through routine exercise reminders, food intake supervision and sleep quality monitoring. Certain health applications even allow users to interact with others having similar health situations so that they can be a motivation for each other.

Conclusions
Various studies showed that health applications help user to control blood sugar levels, which may come in handy to mitigate glycaemic self-control problems.