Better Supporting Human Aspects in Mobile eHealth Apps: Development and Validation of Enhanced Guidelines

CCS

eHealth apps are mobile apps that help in self-management of critical illnesses, provide home-based disease management, and assist with personalized care through education, sensing, and interaction. Users of eHealth apps are naturally very diverse in terms of their human aspects, e.g., their emotional reactions to the apps, varying language proficiency, socioeconomic status, educational level, cognitive style, physical and mental challenges, gender, age, and personality. Unfortunately, many eHealth apps do not take these user differences sufficiently into account, making them ineffective or even unusable. This article presents our enhanced and actionable guidelines developed to better support human aspects in mobile eHealth apps. Some of these guidelines are specific, such as collecting minimal personal data or requirements, while others are more generic, applicable specifically to eHealth apps. We discuss how key human aspects, such as usability, accessibility, reliability, and validity, as well as diverse user issues can be addressed in practice with real-life eHealth app examples. We then collected feedback from expert mobile app developers, software engineers, and other relevant eHealth app stakeholders to assess the usefulness and applicability of the proposed guidelines and to identify areas where further refinement and development are needed.