Usability Based Rating Scale (UBRS) for Evaluation of Mobile Health (mHealth) Applications

Mobile Health (mHealth) applications provide information on public health care supported by mobile devices, including patient monitoring devices and other wireless devices. There is no quality assessment tool for the rating of mHealth applications based on important usability parameters. The primary objective of this chapter is to present a reliable, multipurpose, comprehensive scale for classifying and rating the quality of mHealth applications. The newly defined rating scale is primarily based on the usability parameters extracted from ISO standards, usability guidelines, and empirical study of literature. Initially, the usability of existing mHealth applications is evaluated, and their usability barriers are explored. In this study, the participants were divided into three equal groups, and each group was assigned three mHealth applications to perform a predefined set of tasks. The applications were evaluated by using existing five-star rating scale criteria. The user's study reported mismatched behavior where task performance and efficiency were not aligned with the application's rating criteria. In this chapter, the taxonomy of usability parameters is defined and distributed in five different classes. A questionnaire for rating mHealth applications was also designed, and an overall user rating was calculated by assigning weight to each question. Other three groups were involved in a second session to evaluate different mHealth applications using the newly developed usability-based rating scale (UBRS). It was found that UBRS was compatible with user effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.