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Evaluating and implementing machine learning models for personalised mobile health app recommendations

Morenigbade, Hafsat; Al Jaber, Tareq; Gordon, Neil; Eke, Gregory

Authors

Hafsat Morenigbade

Gregory Eke



Abstract

This paper focuses on the evaluation and recommendation of healthcare applications in the mHealth field. The increase in the use of health applications, supported by an expanding mHealth market, highlights the importance of this research. In this study, a data set including app descriptions, ratings, reviews, and other relevant attributes from various health app platforms was selected. The main goal was to design a recommendation system that leverages app attributes, especially descriptions, to provide users with relevant contextual suggestions. A comprehensive pre-processing regime was carried out, including one-hot encoding, standardisation, and feature engineering. The feature, “Rating_Reviews”, was introduced to capture the cumulative influence of ratings and reviews.
The variable ‘Category’ was chosen as a target to discern different health contexts such as ‘Weight loss’ and ‘Medical’. Various machine learning and deep learning models were evaluated, from the baseline Random Forest Classifier to the sophisticated BERT model.
The results highlighted the efficiency of transfer learning, especially BERT, which achieved an accuracy of approximately 90% after hyperparameter tuning. A final recommendation system was designed, which uses cosine similarity to rank apps based on their relevance to user queries.

Citation

Morenigbade, H., Al Jaber, T., Gordon, N., & Eke, G. (2025). Evaluating and implementing machine learning models for personalised mobile health app recommendations. PLoS ONE, 20(3), e0319828. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0319828

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 7, 2025
Online Publication Date Mar 19, 2025
Publication Date Mar 19, 2025
Deposit Date Mar 21, 2025
Publicly Available Date Mar 24, 2025
Journal PLOS ONE
Print ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 3
Pages e0319828
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0319828
Keywords mHealth
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/5087279
This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals:

SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-Being

Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Copyright Statement
Copyright: © 2025 Morenigbade et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.





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