Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

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

A hybrid evaluation approach and guidance for mHealth education applications

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018. Mobile health education applications (MHEAs) are used to support different users. However, although these applications are increasing in number, there is no effective evaluation framework to measure their usability and thus save effort and time for their many user groups. This paper outlines a useful framework for evaluating MHEAs, together with particular 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 MHEAs. We also propose a guidance tool to help stakeholders choose the most suitable MHEA. The outcome of this framework is envisioned as meeting the requirements of different users, in addition to enhancing the development of MHEAs using software engineering approaches by creating new and more effective evaluation techniques. Finally, we present qualitative and quantitative results for the framework when used with MHEAs

An Investigation into Mobile Based Approach for Healthcare Activities, Occupational Therapy System

This research is to design and optimize the high quality of mobile apps, especially for iOS. The objective of this research is to develop a mobile system for Occupational therapy specialists to access and retrieval information. The investigation identifies the key points of using mobile-D agile methodology in mobile application development. It considers current applications within a different platform. It achieves new apps (OTS) for the health care activities

Distributed Hybrid Simulation of the Internet of Things and Smart Territories

This paper deals with the use of hybrid simulation to build and compose heterogeneous simulation scenarios that can be proficiently exploited to model and represent the Internet of Things (IoT). Hybrid simulation is a methodology that combines multiple modalities of modeling/simulation. Complex scenarios are decomposed into simpler ones, each one being simulated through a specific simulation strategy. All these simulation building blocks are then synchronized and coordinated. This simulation methodology is an ideal one to represent IoT setups, which are usually very demanding, due to the heterogeneity of possible scenarios arising from the massive deployment of an enormous amount of sensors and devices. We present a use case concerned with the distributed simulation of smart territories, a novel view of decentralized geographical spaces that, thanks to the use of IoT, builds ICT services to manage resources in a way that is sustainable and not harmful to the environment. Three different simulation models are combined together, namely, an adaptive agent-based parallel and distributed simulator, an OMNeT++ based discrete event simulator and a script-language simulator based on MATLAB. Results from a performance analysis confirm the viability of using hybrid simulation to model complex IoT scenarios.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0487

A systematic review of usability challenges and testing in mobile health

Nowadays, the combining of advanced mobile communications and mobile account now in portable devices named "smart phones" has becomes more great uses.Among of these include health care professionals. Few studies in the challenge, blurred reality challenge facing the patient and developer alike in the usability of mobile health.Therefore, this pape

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done