Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Jeeves - an Experience Sampling study creation tool

Ubiquitous mobile technology affords clinicians new opportunities to enhance personalised, patient-centric care remotely, easing the burden on both patient and clinician. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) involves the repeated assessment of patients on their symptoms or behaviours, and their external contexts, as they go about their everyday lives, enhancing ecological validity and minimising recall bias. While previously conducted with paper diaries, ESM smartphone applications are now being employed, that have a range of benefits over paper-based methods including the ability to scale to many more patients. However, development of such applications is time-consuming and requires considerable programming knowledge. This has prompted the development of ESM creation tools that alleviate a researcher from the burden of programming an ESM application from scratch. This paper presents our work on Jeeves, a visual environment for creating secure ESM Android applications, and a usability evaluation we conducted with health psychology students.Postprin

User requirements for the development of smartphone self-reporting applications in healthcare

Two case studies of the development of Smartphone self-reporting mHealth applications are described: a wellness diary for asthma management combined with Bluetooth pulse oximeter and manual peak flow measurements; and a questionnaire for ecological assessment of distress during fertility treat-ment. Results are presented of user experiences with the self-reporting applica-tion and the capture of physiological measurements in the case of the asthma diary project and the findings from a phone audit at an early stage of design in the case of the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) study. Issues raised by ethics commit-tees are also discussed. It is concluded that the optimal adoption of Smartphone self-reporting applications will require a good appreciation of user and ethics panel requirements at an early stage in their development, so that the correct de-sign choices can be made

Overcoming mental blocks:A blocks-based approach to experience sampling studies

Experience Sampling Method (ESM) studies repeatedly survey participants on their behaviours and experiences as they go about their everyday lives. Smartphones afford an ideal platform for ESM study applications as devices seldom leave their users, and can automatically sense surrounding context to augment subjective survey responses. ESM studies are employed in fields such as psychology and social science where researchers are not necessarily programmers and require tools for application creation. Previous tools using web forms, text files, or flowchart paradigms are either insufficient to model the potential complexity of study protocols, or fail to provide a low threshold to entry. We demonstrate that blocks programming simultaneously lowers the barriers to creating simple study protocols, while enabling the creation of increasingly sophisticated protocols. We discuss the design of Jeeves, our blocks-based environment for ESM studies, and explain advantages that blocks afford in ESM study design.Postprin

Native Apps versus Web Apps: which is best for healthcare applications?

Smartphone applications (Apps) provide a new way to deliver healthcare, illustrated by the fact that healthcare Apps are estimated to make up over 30% of new Apps currently being developed; with this number seemingly set to increase as the benefits become more apparent. In this paper, using the development of an In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment stress study App as the exemplar, the alternatives of Native App and Web App design and implementa-tion are considered across several factors that include: user interface, ease of development, capabilities, performance, cost, and potential problems. Development for iOS and Android platforms and a Web App using JavaScript and HTML5 are discussed

D2.1 Report on analysis of the requirements for MONOCLE sensors including projection of cost-savings and stakeholder feedback. Deliverable report of project H2020 MONOCLE (grant 776480)

Requirements for MONOCLE sensors were analysed at the start of sensor development, particularly with regard to projected cost-savings in monitoring and specific stakeholder feedback. The main inputs from stakeholders were obtained from the MONOCLE water quality monitoring survey (D9.1) and are used here to define sensor-specific development priorities, particularly with respect to purpose, performance, cost and interoperability. This document guides both the initial development of new sensors and evolution of existing prototypes to higher technological readiness levels

Smartphones in ecology and evolution: a guide for the app-rehensive

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordSmartphones and their apps (application software) are now used by millions of people worldwide and represent a powerful combination of sensors, information transfer, and computing power that deserves better exploitation by ecological and evolutionary researchers. We outline the development process for research apps, provide contrasting case studies for two new research apps, and scan the research horizon to suggest how apps can contribute to the rapid collection, interpretation, and dissemination of data in ecology and evolutionary biology. We emphasize that the usefulness of an app relies heavily on the development process, recommend that app developers are engaged with the process at the earliest possible stage, and commend efforts to create open-source software scaffolds on which customized apps can be built by nonexperts. We conclude that smartphones and their apps could replace many traditional handheld sensors, calculators, and data storage devices in ecological and evolutionary research. We identify their potential use in the high-throughput collection, analysis, and storage of complex ecological information.Marie Curie Intra‐European FellowshipAcademy of FinlandUniversity of HelsinkiFishmongers' CompanyEuropean Social Fun

An Empirical Investigation of Performance Overhead in Cross-Platform Mobile Development Frameworks

The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach.publishedVersio