Mobile health applications used for health behaviour change in metabolic syndrome: protocol for a scoping review

Metabolic syndrome is a major public-health challenge worldwide. It's risk factors include overweight and obesity, insulin resistance, physical inactivity, genetic factors, and ageing. Metabolic syndrome elevates the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and other health issues, such as atherosclerosis. To reduce these risks, patients should lose weight, increase physical activity, and adopt a healthy diet. There's been a surge in preventive digital health interventions fostering lifestyle changes and monitoring health behaviours like exercise, diet, alcohol consumption, smoking, stress levels and medication adherence. This paper outlines a protocol for a systematic scoping review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR), focusing on the following research questions. (1) Which digital health interventions are used for changing health behaviours among adult populations with metabolic syndrome in healthcare settings? (2) How can we characterise these interventions using the PICOTS-ComTeC (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, Timing, Setting, Communication, Technology, Context) framework? In particular, we aim to identify smartphone apps used by patients with metabolic syndrome, describe their mechanism of action, the health behaviour changes they support, and the outcomes used to measure their effect. Furthermore, we intend to examine the level of detail these applications are described in the literature.