The influence of usability factors for mobile health apps
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Human intervention study investigating the usability of mobile health tools to monitor food intake and physical activity for different user groups.
IRAS ID
188160
Contact name
Charlotte Holmes
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 2 months, 0 days
Research summary
This intervention study is being conducted as part of the wider project ‘PREventive Care Infrastructure based on Ubiquitous Sensing’ (PRECIOUS), which has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 611366. Overall, PRECIOUS aims to provide a preventive care system to promote healthy lifestyles, and as part of this PRECIOUS aims to develop a new monitoring tool based on semi-automated digital image capture and processing (via a smart watch), and will also investigate motivational techniques for educating the user about healthy eating practices.
The objective of this intervention study is to investigate the usability of two freely available mobile health tools currently on the market, and one mobile health tools currently being developed through a EC-FP7 project. The study will look at the factors that affect the usability of each mobile health tool for different user groups, in order to improve the design of the EU PRECIOUS mobile health tool. In total three hundred respondents will be recruited (100 per mobile health tool) to complete a 7 day user trial of one of the three mobile health tools. They will then be asked to complete an on-line survey about the usability of the mobile health tool. The outcomes from the study will be used to improve the mobile health tool currently being developed by PRECIOUS.REC name
Wales REC 7
REC reference
15/WA/0379
Date of REC Opinion
8 Oct 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion