Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

Gordon, Neil; Aljaber, Tareq

Abstract

Paper presented at 8th International conference on e-Health (EH 2016), 1-3 July 2016, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. ABSTRACT Mobile applications for health education are commonly utilized to support patients and health professionals. A critical evaluation framework is required to ensure the usability and reliability of mobile health education applications in order to facilitate the saving of time and effort for the various user groups; thus, the aim of this paper is to describe a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education. The intended outcome of this framework is to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories and to improve the development of mobile health education applications with software engineering approaches, by creating new and more effective techniques to evaluate such software. This paper first highlights the importance of mobile health education apps, then explains the need to establish an evaluation framework for these apps. The paper provides a description of the evaluation framework, along with some specific evaluation metrics: an efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors to enable the determination of the usefulness and usability of health education mobile apps. Finally, an explanation of the initial results for the framework was obtained using a Medscape mobile app. The proposed framework - An Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps – is a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set in heuristic and usability evaluation, filtered based on interviews from patients and health professionals. These five metrics correspond to specific facets of usability identified through a requirements analysis of typical users of mobile health apps. These metrics were decomposed into 21 specific questionnaire questions, which are available on request from first author.

Citation

Gordon, N., & Aljaber, T. (2016). Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients.

• Conference Name: Proceedings of the International Conference on E-Health, EH 2016 - Part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2016
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 22, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 107-114
• ISBN: 9789898533531
• Keywords: Usability evaluation, Heuristic evaluation, Metrics, Health professionals, Evaluation framework
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/441616
• Publisher URL: Details of e-Health 2016 are available at http://ehealth-conf.org/.