Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Conflicts Related to Mobile Applications for Sleep Improvement

Abstract

The sleep disorders are a variety of conditions that affect sleep and they seem to be increasing considerably among the population. At the same time, technological solutions have recently appeared claiming to help improve the sleep quality. Due to its ubiquity and ease of use, mobile applications are among the most commonly used technological aids to improve sleep among their users. The objective of this work is to analyze, under an ethical judgement, the literature review about reliability and validity of mobile applications focused on sleep disorders, the ethical conflicts generated and the ethical judgment of the users. The methodology followed consisted, on the one hand, an on-line search to collect a set of mobile applications focused on improving sleep that were recommended by some medical, governmental or at least non-commercial association or agency. The search has been conducted including the key words “sleep mobile app”. On the other hand, a search of scientific publications has been carried out in order to find objective evidence about the observable performance selected apps. The results obtained include a total of 31 different apps available either on the Android and iOS operating systems. Among that set, only 7 of them are mentioned in some clinical study. It is a low number given the amount of applications available, the estimated number of active users and taking into account that kind of information is completely unknown for the digital stores’ users.