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Development and Evaluation of Tools for Measuring the Quality of Experience (QoE) in mHealth Applications

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Abstract

The rapid spread of smartphones and tablets in the last years has created a new software industry whose fast growth has propitiated numerous low-quality applications to be revised and improved. The main aim of this paper is to develop a tool to assess the Quality of Experience (QoE) of mobile Health (mHealth) applications in order to improve the quality of the existing apps and the ones to be released. Firstly, a review of the applications of mHealth has been done in order to obtain a general classification. Secondly, the tool for measuring the QoE is developed in the form of a survey with the help of psychologists. Finally, this tool is evaluated using a sample of applications selected with the aid of the classification obtained. A survey with 21 questions using the Likert scale and destined to users has been successfully created, and its evaluation has been positive, resulting in a good method for measuring the QoE of the different features that the applications in the field of health care usually have. The tool created can be very useful for developers in order to assess the quality of their health care apps, indicating their positive aspects and the ones which must be revised and improved, avoiding the releasing of low-quality apps.

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Abbreviations

QoE:

Quality of experience

mHealth:

Mobile health

MOS:

Mean opinion score

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Acknowledgments

This research has been partially supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Signal Theory and Communications, and Telematics Engineering, University of Valladolid, Paseo de Belén, 15, 47011, Valladolid, Spain

    Borja Martínez-Pérez, Isabel de la Torre-Díez, Sonia Candelas-Plasencia & Miguel López-Coronado

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  1. Borja Martínez-Pérez
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  2. Isabel de la Torre-Díez
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  3. Sonia Candelas-Plasencia
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  4. Miguel López-Coronado
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Correspondence to Borja Martínez-Pérez.

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Martínez-Pérez, B., de la Torre-Díez, I., Candelas-Plasencia, S. et al. Development and Evaluation of Tools for Measuring the Quality of Experience (QoE) in mHealth Applications. J Med Syst 37, 9976 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9976-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9976-x

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