A guidance and evaluation approach for mHealth education applications

Gordon, Neil; Aljaber, Tareq

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. A growing number of mobile applications for health education are being utilized to support different stakeholders, from health professionals to software developers to patients and more general users. There is a lack of a critical evaluation framework to ensure the usability and reliability of these mobile health education applications (MHEAs). Such a framework would facilitate the saving of time and effort for the different user groups. This paper describes a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education, including a guidance tool to help different stakeholders select the one most suitable for them. The framework is intended to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories, as well as improving the development of MHEAs through software engineering approaches. A description of the evaluation framework is provided, with its efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors. Lastly, an account of the quantitative and qualitative results for the framework applied to the Medscape and other mobile apps is given. This proposed framework - an Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps - consists of a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set during heuristic and usability evaluation, the choice being based on interviews with patients, software developers and health professionals.

Citation

Gordon, N., & Aljaber, T. (2017). A guidance and evaluation approach for mHealth education applications. In Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Technology in Education; Lecture Notes in Computer Science (330-340). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58515-4_26

• Acceptance Date: Jun 30, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 17, 2017
• Publication Date: May 17, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 27, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 27, 2017
• Journal: Lecture notes in computer science
• Print ISSN: 0302-9743
• Electronic ISSN: 1611-3349
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10296
• Pages: 330-340
• Book Title: Learning and Collaboration Technologies. Technology in Education; Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783319585147; 9783319585154
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58515-4_26
• Keywords: Heuristic evaluation; Usability evaluation; Evaluation framework; Stakeholders Metrics
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/455152
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58515-4_26
• Additional Information: This is the author's accepted version of an article published in Lecture notes in computer science (2017) v.10296.