Health Quadrant mHealth Application: A Performance Analysis of the Heart Rate Accuracy vis a vis a Pulse Oximeter

Abstract

Mobile health (mHealth) applications that provide accurate measurements will give a person the ability to communicate his health data to his doctor, detect early signs of underlying health issues and personally monitor his everyday health. However, because of rapid growth of mHealth applications that intend to measure different physiological parameters, it has become difficult for people to determine which mHealth applications are reliable. Its unreliability can put a person's health more at risk which is why testing its accuracy is vital prior to its deployment and usage; otherwise the purpose of mHealth will not be realized. With this, the researchers wanted to find out the accuracy of the Android based "Health Quadrant" mHealth application in its resting heart rate reading using three Android Wear smart watches and a pulse oximeter. Agile development model was adopted by the researcher and twenty-five individuals served as the respondents. They were asked to wear the three smart watches and the pulse oximeter as part of the experiment. Statistical analysis of the results using root mean square error(RMSE) showed that Health Quadrant mHealth application installed on Moto 360 has the best performance since it has the least prediction error.