article · Discover Computing
Mobile healthcare technologies have expanded access to medical services, enabling personalised treatment plans and continuous health monitoring. However, the proliferation of these digital tools has been accompanied by a surge in cyber threats, resulting in notable financial losses and operational disruption across the health sector. A review of research published between 2018 and 2025 evaluated forty primary studies to examine current technological features, threat models, and detection techniques. The analysis classified core vulnerabilities into areas including data compromise, malicious software attacks, insecure system architectures, and human weaknesses. It reviewed both centralised and decentralised methods for identifying intrusions, alongside standard and emerging mitigation strategies. The assessment concluded that critical security gaps persist, highlighting necessary avenues of future investigation to better safeguard sensitive patient records across connected platforms.
Mobile health services allow individuals to monitor health conditions remotely and access medical support easily. However, weak security can expose highly confidential medical data to malicious exploitation and cause financial harm. Establishing clear mitigation and threat detection approaches helps protect patient privacy and ensures that digital health infrastructure remains trustworthy and resilient as adoption widens.
The review provides architectural guidance and mitigation concepts that software developers, healthcare providers, and policymakers can apply to secure mobile health applications. Because this work is an analytical synthesis of published academic literature rather than a newly tested software product, the research is at an early conceptual stage. Any practical application would require industry partners to develop, integrate, and validate these proposed security and detection approaches within commercial health platforms.
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Mobile healthcare (mHealth) delivery has revolutionized the healthcare industry 5.0. With the move toward mHealth, access to healthcare services has gradually increased, allowing individualized treatment routines, and real-time health monitoring. However, cybersecurity threats to mHealth systems also increase as their use increases. The continuous rise of cyber threats has recently affected the healthcare delivery sector. These have caused much financial damage and fears in the past few years. This paper aims to systematically assess and categorize the cyber threats in mHealth applications to guide the industry-wide adoption and prospects. A systematic literature review was carried out between 2018 and 2025 including 40 primary study papers were synthesized out of 24,854 search articles. The study discussed mHealth, trends, features, and main technologies to explore the advancement of mHealth. It presents cyber threats in mHealth applications where the common cyber threats were identified and security challenges such as data compromise, malicious attacks, insecure systems, and user vulnerabilities. We provided mitigation strategies to address the inherent challenges. It further highlights traditional and contemporary and centralized and decentralized detection approaches to cyber threats for effective implementation of patient health data. The findings showed that much work is left undone which we offered in open research prospects. The outlined open research prospects will improve the security and privacy of health-sensitive data against cyber threats. The practical implication of this study is that it will guide all health stakeholders, such as patients, health professionals, agencies, government and policymakers, and researchers, in improving the security and privacy of patients’ data in digital cyberspace.
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DOI: 10.1007/s10791-025-09686-z
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