Towards mHealth applications for pet animal owners: a comprehensive literature review of requirements.

Abstract

Background: Veterinarians experience high workloads and stress levels in their daily work, of which they need to be relieved as much as possible. The general public is showing great interest in digital health services. At the same time, animal owners and veterinarians are seeing telehealth services as particularly positive for triage aspects in veterinary medicine. One approach to support veterinarians may be to enable pet owners to, for instance, make informed decisions on how urgent their animal needs to be examined by a veterinary professional through an mHealth application. For this, stakeholder requirements need to be gathered, which should provide as a starting point for the development of such a decision support system.

Results: 955 publications were screened, resulting in the extraction of 10 requirements to mHealth applications for animal owners from 13 publications. Most frequently mentioned aspects were: ensuring complete information input by the user (6 mentions) and displaying a disclaimer about application limitations prominently (5 mentions).

Conclusions: Most of the extracted requirements focus on the design of the human-computer interface, revealing this as a crucial point to such applications, especially in guiding animal owners through information and ensuring understanding, particularly of application limitations. However, the small number of included publications shows that primary research in this field, in general, and in this specific topic in particular, is needed in order to fully reflect the requirements for an mHealth application to help animal owners decide on their animal's need to be examined by a veterinary professional.