Use of a Mobile App for the Process Evaluation of an Intervention in Health Care: Development and Usability Study

Exploring Usability of a Clinical Decision Support System for Cancer Care: A User-Centered Study

BACKGROUND

Adverse effects are a common burden for cancer patients, impacting their well-being and diminishing their quality of life. Therefore, it is essential to have a clinical decision support system that can proactively monitor patient progress to prevent and manage complications.

AIMS

This research aims to thoroughly test the usability and user-friendliness of a medical device designed for managing adverse events for cancer patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs). The study seeks to assess how well the device meets both patients' and HCPs' needs in real-world scenarios.

METHODS AND RESULTS

The study used a multi-method approach to obtain a comprehensive understanding of participants experience and objective measure of usability. The testing was conducted with a diverse group of participants of six patients and six HCPs. Analysis included a descriptive summary of the demographic data, scenario completion rates, System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire score, and qualitative feedback from users. All participants successfully completed 100% of the activities, indicating a high level of understanding and usability across both user groups. Only two out of six patients encountered errors during the login activities, but these errors were unrelated to product safety. The obtained SUS score is in the 90th percentile for both user groups, classifying the device as grade A and highlighting its superior usability. Patients and HCPs found the interface intuitive and expressed an interest in incorporating the application into their daily routines and would recommend the application to others.

CONCLUSION

The assessed digital health medical device demonstrates excellent usability, safety, and ease of use for oncology patients and HCPs. Based on the received constructive feedback, minor improvements were identified for further refinement of the application that do not affect either its intended functionality or the overall functioning of the tool. Future work will focus on implementing these improvements and conducting further usability studies in clinical environments.

Mobile Health Requirements for the Occupational Health Assessment of Health Care Professionals: Delphi Study

BACKGROUND

In recent years, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, awareness of the high level of stress among health care professionals has increased, and research in this area has intensified. Hospital staff members have historically been known to work in an environment involving high emotional demands, time pressure, and workload. Furthermore, the pandemic has increased the strain experienced by health care professionals owing to the high number of people they need to manage and, on many occasions, the limited available resources with which they must carry out their functions. These psychosocial risks are not always well dealt with by the organization or the professionals themselves. Therefore, it is necessary to have tools to assess these psychosocial risks and to optimize the management of this demand from health care professionals. Digital health, and more specifically, mobile health (mHealth), is presented as a health care modality that can contribute greatly to respond to these unmet needs.

OBJECTIVE

We aimed to analyze whether mHealth tools can provide value for the study and management of psychosocial risks in health care professionals, and assess the requirements of these tools.

METHODS

A Delphi study was carried out to determine the opinions of experts on the relevance of using mHealth tools to evaluate physiological indicators and psychosocial factors in order to assess occupational health, and specifically, stress and burnout, in health care professionals. The study included 58 experts with knowledge and experience in occupational risk prevention, psychosocial work, and health-related technology, as well as health professionals from private and public sectors.

RESULTS

Our data suggested that there is still controversy about the roles that organizations play in occupational risk prevention in general and psychosocial risks in particular. An adequate assessment of the stress levels and psychosocial factors can help improve employees' well-being. Moreover, making occupational health evaluations available to the team would positively affect employees by increasing their feelings of being taken into account by the organization. This assessment can be improved with mHealth tools that identify and quickly highlight the difficulties or problems that occur among staff and work teams. However, to achieve good adherence and participation in occupational health and safety evaluations, experts consider that it is essential to ensure the privacy of professionals and to develop feelings of being supported by their supervisors.

CONCLUSIONS

For years, mHealth has been used mainly to propose intervention programs to improve occupational health. Our research highlights the usefulness of these tools for evaluating psychosocial risks in a preliminary and essential phase of approaches to improve the health and well-being of professionals in health care settings. The most urgent requirements these tools must meet are those aimed at protecting the confidentiality and privacy of measurements.

An e-Mental Health Resource for COVID-19-Associated Stress Reduction: Mixed Methods Study of Reach, Usability, and User Perceptions

BACKGROUND

COVID-19 and its public health response are having a profound effect on people's mental health. To provide support during these times, Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health [CAMH]) launched the Mental Health and COVID-19 Pandemic website on March 18, 2020. This website was designed to be a nonstigmatizing psychoeducational resource for people experiencing mild to moderate distress due to COVID-19 and the public health response to the pandemic.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to examine the reach, usability, and user perceptions of the CAMH Mental Health and COVID-19 Pandemic website.

METHODS

This study used a mixed methods sequential explanatory design approach, which consisted of the following 2 distinct phases: (1) quantitative data collection and analysis and (2) qualitative semistructured interviews. In phase 1, we analyzed Google Analytics data to understand how many people visited the website and which were the most visited pages. We conducted a survey to identify users' sociodemographic backgrounds, and assess the usability of the website using the System Usability Scale and users' subjective stress levels using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10). For phase 2, we conducted semistructured interviews to explore user experiences; user motivation, engagement, satisfaction, and perception of the stress reduction strategies; reflections of the website's functionality, ease of use, navigation, and design; and recommendations for improvement.

RESULTS

Google Analytics results showed 146,978 unique users from June 2020 to March 2021. Most users were from Canada (130,066, 88.5%). Between February 20, 2021, and June 4, 2021, 152 users completed the survey. Most users identified as white, female, and having at least a college degree. Based on the PSS-10 scores, most participants were experiencing moderate to high stress when they visited the website. Users rated the usability of the website as acceptable. Ten users completed in-depth interviews between May 2021 and June 2021. Positive feedback related to the content was that the website was a trustworthy source of mental health information with helpful evidence-based stress reduction strategies. Areas for improvement included the text heavy design of the website, wider dissemination/marketing, and greater accessibility of the website to meet the needs of diverse populations.

CONCLUSIONS

Adding stress reduction resources to a website from a well-respected institution may be a practical method to increase awareness and access to evidence-based stress reduction resources during times of crisis, where there is severe disruption to usual health care contacts. Efforts to ensure that these resources are more widely accessed, especially by diverse populations, are needed.

Predicting the survival of kidney transplantation: design and evaluation of a smartphone-based application

Background

Prediction of graft survival for Kidney Transplantation (KT) is considered a risky task due to the scarcity of donating organs and the use of health care resources. The present study aimed to design and evaluate a smartphone-based application to predict the survival of KT in patients with End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD).

Method

Based on the initial review, a researcher-made questionnaire was developed to assess the information needs of the application through urologists and nephrologists. By using information obtained from the questionnaire, a checklist was prepared, and the information of 513 patients with kidney failure was collected from their records at Sina Urological Research Center. Then, three data mining algorithms were applied to them. The smartphone-based application for the prediction of kidney transplant survival was designed, and a standard usability assessment questionnaire was used to evaluate the designed application.

Results

Three information elements related to the required data in different sections of demographic information, sixteen information elements related to patient clinical information, and four critical capabilities were determined for the design of the smartphone-based application. C5.0 algorithm with the highest accuracy (87.21%) was modeled as the application inference engine. The application was developed based on the PhoneGap framework. According to the participants’ scores (urologists and nephrologists) regarding the usability evaluation of the application, it can be concluded that both groups participating in the study could use the program, and they rated the application at a "good" level.

Conclusion

Since the overall performance or usability of the smartphone-based app was evaluated at a reasonable level, it can be used with certainty to predict kidney transplant survival.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12882-022-02841-4.

Co-creation with research participants to inform the design of electronic informed consent

Objective

This study aimed to provide recommendations for a personalized electronic informed consent interface that is adapted to research participants’ needs and could enable a longitudinal interaction between the participants and the research team.

Methods

The co-creation process consisted of three co-creation workshops, one focus group discussion, and four semi-structured interviews. In total, 24 participants, who had taken part in four disparate clinical studies in Belgium, were involved. Descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis were applied to analyze the survey data and audio recordings.

Results

Varying perceptions on the type and amount of information described in an informed consent form were reported. Other findings were related to the structure and presentation of information, setting preferences for data sharing, and electronically signing new informed consent versions. Regarding the long-term interaction, most of the participants wanted to receive progress updates, including the results, of the study in which they had taken part. They proposed to receive a notification, preferably via email, in case new information is made available on the electronic informed consent interface.

Conclusions

To optimally support the design of an electronic informed consent interface, it is key to understand the research participants’ needs. Study findings suggest that an electronic informed consent interface may be a promising technological application to interactively provide study-related information and to keep participants informed during and after the clinical study.