Should We Better Stick to Pen and Paper? An Empirical Investigation on Functionality, Privacy and Data-Security of Physiotherapy Telehealth Applications.

Abstract

Telehealth and mHealth apps become increasingly popular in health professions such as physiotherapy calling for increased awareness on functionality, privacy, and data security. This work presents a functionality, privacy, and data-security evaluation of four telehealth services commonly used in physiotherapy. We examined functionality and features, data protection, privacy implementations and data-security with a questionnaire and performed an in-depth investigation of the services. Privacy and security relevant findings such as use of outdated webservers, problems with certificate renewal as well as questionable GDPR compliance were reported. Due to the privacy and security relevant findings in this analysis it can be concluded that there is a need for improvement in design, development, operation as well as regulation of telehealth apps and services.