According with the GDPR the essential 
information should be clear and made available to the 
user, followed by options for the user to specify what 
personal data can or cannot be processed, preferably 
with icons or pictures. Clearly, this situation is not 
happening at the moment. These are basic privacy 
mandatory requirements that should be made 
available for every type of app, much so for people 
with dementia, who need more care and clarity when 
exposed to this technology.  
Another critical issue is that one third of the 
analysed apps do not inform the user about what type 
of data and features the app will be accessing when 
running while more than a third request some type of 
personal data to be installed to fully function. This 
disparity of procedures is not helpful and, many 
times, there is no need to request personal data unless 
the apps have more complete features such as health 
advisors, health journals or functionalities that allow 
data to be shared, for instance, with health 
professionals. However, apps to train brain activity 
and cognition, even if they follow users’ progress, 
they commonly do not need to require personal data, 
nor even data from special categories such as health 
related data (as shown in Table 1, for almost all apps 
this GDPR key requirement is not applicable). Still, if 
they do, they need to make users well aware of what 
data are being processed, how and what security 
measures are in place and consent must be provided 
at all times before that processing starts. Contrary to 
this, most analysed apps do not provide the 
opportunity to give consent to the various parameters. 
Further, in the cases where this is possible (11%), 
there is no liberty for the users to change their mind 
and revoke that previously given consent.  
As to the right to be forgotten, even when the user 
creates an account and introduces personal data, a 
small number of cases allow users to delete their 
profile entirely, again, not in conformance with 
GDPR.  
Limitations. During this research the authors could 
not find information and studies about the impact of 
the new GDPR on the development of mHealth apps 
and more specifically in cases of apps for people with 
dementia, to be able to compare with.  
Our sample is very small because, as a first study 
in this area, we decided to focus on a restrict group of 
apps that specified in their description that they were 
designed to improve the cognitive function of people 
with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Due to time 
constraints only one researcher did the selection and 
revision process. However, used methods can be re-
used/improved by other researchers and re-applied 
for a larger sample. Also, we have just experimented 
and tested apps for Android, making exclusive 
applications for iOS system excluded in our study. 
6 CONCLUSION 
Despite all the advantages that apps seem to offer to 
keep the brain active and help people with AD and 
dementia to better cope with their disease, there are 
several security and privacy concerns that are still not 
addressed. This is particular important for this group 
of people as they can potentially be more vulnerable 
and less aware to online dangers and privacy breaches 
as they may lack the cognitive capacity to interpret 
and fully realize the problems. 
Through this study we found that most available 
analysed apps do not provide any information about 
how they process and treat personal data or, if they 
do, it is not done in a very clear manner. Furthermore, 
most of the key requirements mandated by GDPR are 
still not implemented in the available apps and so 
these do not comply with regulation to ensure privacy 
and security in the interactions between users and 
mobile apps, for European citizens.  
This work intends to bring awareness to this issue 
to both researchers and developers, especially in the 
area of healthcare and mental health. Further, it aims 
to give some recommendations for future research, 
e.g., (1) structured guidelines or principles should be 
made available online for all mobile app developers 
during the app creation process, to ensure 
transparency and to be as much as possible GDPR 
compliant, (2) the generalized use of simple, clear, 
transparent and understandable Privacy Policy,  
always available through a button in the menu 
configurations or even in another visible part of the 
app, (3) mandatory use of explicit consent, thus when 
a user is making a registration on a mobile app, s/he 
should be asked to opt-in to have their data collected 
or receive communications (emails or notifications) 
and this could be done through a consent screen on 
the app launch. This screen should also show 
information about what user´s data will be collected 
and how they are going to be processed, (4) available 
functionality where users can ask for their data to be 
removed or can request their data to be deleted and 
have an opt-out of communications/notifications, (5) 
strong encryption algorithms of personal data by 
default, (6) every mobile app must include contact 
information of the business or app developer, so that 
users can contact them and have a quicker and clearer 
support, and, most importantly, (7) the existence of 
app regulations made by credible entities related to