Automated Regulatory Classification of Mobile Medical Apps

Mobile medical applications provide a variety of functionalities for users, from managing critical personal data to providing basic medical information. However, due to the variety of functionalities and lack of consistent and concrete regulatory oversight across app marketplaces, medical apps potentially pose a threat to users who are generally unaware of app capabilities. Therefore, in order to help legal experts quickly identify which regulatory body applies to medical apps used by consumers, we present a method to convert and plot the prose of both app descriptions and regulatory legalese into a vector space to facilitate rapid cosine similarity scoring. Our study demonstrates how to automate the regulation of mobile medical apps using descriptions in the language of regulatory bodies. Our results show a need for comprehensive regulatory oversight of medical apps, with 54.8% of apps on Google Play and 58% of apps on the Apple App Store.