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

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