Mental Health Apps Available in App Stores for Indian Users: Protocol for a Systematic Review (Preprint)

BACKGROUND There has been a surge in mental health apps over the past few years. While these have great potential to address the unmet mental health needs of the population, the recent proliferation of mental health apps in the commercial marketplace has raised several concerns, such as privacy, evidence-based, and quality. Although there is mounting research on the effectiveness of mental health apps, the majority of these are not accessible to the public and most of those available have not been researched. Despite the rapid growth of the digital health market in India, there are no comprehensive reviews of publicly available mental health apps for Indian users. Hence it becomes important to review mental health apps freely available to potential end users in terms of their scope, functions, and quality. OBJECTIVE This study aims to systematically evaluate mental health apps available to Indian users in app stores. METHODS This systematic review of mental health apps will be performed following the Target user, Evaluation focus, Connectedness and Health domain approach and the PASSR (Protocol for App Store Systematic Reviews) checklist. Fifteen key search terms covering various mental health conditions and therapies will be used on the Android and iOS stores. The identified apps will be further screened and reviewed based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The pool of eligible apps will be downloaded for detailed review. The following steps will be adopted to streamline the review process and interrater consistency. Six apps will be randomly selected from the downloaded apps, for joint discussion and review by a team of 4 primary reviewers and 2 mentors. Following this, a new set of 6 randomly selected apps will be rated independently by the primary reviewers and the differences in ratings will be jointly discussed for generating consensus. Subsequently, the primary reviewers will individually review the remaining apps in the list. Data will be extracted based on predecided parameters such as privacy policy, basic purpose, type of developer, nature of intervention strategies, and guided versus unguided nature. Additionally, the apps will be reviewed for quality using the Mobile Application Rating Scale. The data analysis and synthesis strategy will incorporate descriptive statistics based on quality evaluation using the Mobile Application Rating Scale and examining the content of the apps for generating descriptive information. RESULTS The initial screening of mental health apps available for Indian users on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store was initiated in October 2024. We expect to complete the detailed systematic review by April 2025. CONCLUSIONS This study will offer a comprehensive review of mental health apps available in digital marketplaces for Indian users and has implications for end users, policy makers, developers, and mental health professionals. CLINICALTRIAL International Platform of Registered Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols INPLASY2024100035; https://inplasy.com/inplasy-2024-10-0035/ INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT DERR1-10.2196/71071