TITLE:
Dental Apps for Smartphones: New Way of Providing Services and Education
AUTHORS:
Isabella Marques Faria, Mariana Coutinho Sancas, Andréa Vaz Braga Pintor, Laura Salignac Guimarães Primo
KEYWORDS:
Apps, Smartphone, Dentistry, Education, Clinical Practice
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.9 No.5,
April
23,
2018
ABSTRACT: Objective: To review the literature about dental applications (DAPP) for smartphones (SP) and search/describe DAPP available in Portuguese, in 3 operating systems. Methods: Aiming the review, the terms “smartphones”, “app” and “dentistry” were searched in the databases Pubmed, Virtual Health Library (BVS) and Google Scholar. Based on the review results, DAPP were searched for teaching and learning (TL), clinical practice (CP), patient orientation (PO) and professional update (PU), in Portuguese, in the Android, iOS and Windows systems. In 3 SP (iPhone 5S with iOS 9.3.5; Samsung Galaxy A5 6 2016 with Android; Microsoft-RM-1109 with Windows Phone 8.1 Update2) the term “dentistry” was inserted in APP searches. Results: Forty-three papers were included in the review and 215 DAPP were selected: 120 on Android, 90 on iOS, and 5 on Windows. DAPP were classified according to the focus in: CP (n = 99); PO (n = 6); CP/PO (n = 64); TL/CP (n = 6); TL (n = 38); TL/CP/PO (n = 1) And PU and TL (n = 1). The majority of the DAPP was not validated by any Dental institution (93.02%) and was no cost way for users (81.86%), although only 58.14 were updated. Conclusion: Most of the papers showed as main focus CP, TL and PO. The DAPP available in Portuguese for Dentistry were mostly developed for clinical practice, with a lack of those for patient orientation and teaching and learning. Future Dental APP should provide evidence-based, validated, updated data.