A Context-Aware Usability Model for Mobile Health Applications

Mobile healthcare is a fast growing area of research that capitalizes on mobile technologies and wearables to provide realtime and continuous monitoring and analysis of vital signs of users. Yet, most of the current applications are developed for general population without taking into consideration the context and needs of different user groups. Designing and developing mobile health applications and diaries according to the user context can significantly improve the quality of user interaction and encourage the application use. In this paper, we propose a user context model and a set of usability attributes for developing mobile applications in healthcare. The proposed model and the selected attributes are integrated into a mobile application development framework to provide user-centered and context-aware guidelines. To validate our framework, a mobile diary was implemented for patients undergoing Peritoneal Dialysis (PD) and tested with real users.