Precision Public Health and the Role of mHealth: The Use of Smartphone Applications Worldwide in Mitigating the COVID-19 Pandemic and Their Integration as Components of Public Health Policies. A Focus on the French Example

The COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity to observe how, in practice, the means of precision public health could materialize, be mobilized, and with what results. Among the various measures required to control the pandemic, we can highlight the use of smartphones and applications, in particular, contact tracing applications. Their deployment has been almost synchronous all over the world, and their use called for by the public sector as well as the private sector. It is an innovation that has not encountered major problems in terms of regulation, in part due to exceptional regimes justified by the pandemic, such as a state of a health emergency. However, privacy issues do exist, as do issues relating to the social implementation of these services. Here, we examine in several countries what has been the place of the use of smartphones in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what seems to have been the use of it as a prototype on a global scale of a precision public health tool. A particular focus is made on Europe and France more specifically.