A Modular Mobile Health App for Personalized Rehabilitation Throughout the Breast Cancer Care Continuum: Development Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Although many mobile health (mHealth) apps as a support tool for self-management of breast cancer have evolved, limited studies have developed a comprehensive app and described the algorithms for personalized rehabilitation in the breast cancer care continuum. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to develop a comprehensive mobile app and an algorithm that adjust personalized content to facilitate self-management throughout the breast cancer care continuum. METHODS The development process of the modular app included the following six steps: (1) organizing expert teams, (2) defining evidence-based fundamental content and modules, (3) classifying user cases according to surgery type and treatment, (4) describing algorithms of the key modules for personalized content, (5) constructing the app platform and connectivity to digital health care devices, and (6) conducting a user evaluation of the key modules using needs and satisfaction questionnaires after app testing. RESULTS The expert teams developed algorithms and the mHealth app to dynamically adjust the content for individual patients throughout the breast cancer care continuum. The review of the related literature, and guidelines and the development of the app took 18 months. User evaluation outcomes were positive, with needs and satisfaction questionnaire scores of 4.4 and 4.1 of 5, respectively. The ranking results demonstrated that personalized exercise was the most needed feature with the highest satisfaction score. CONCLUSIONS The strength of this study was the development of a comprehensive mHealth app and algorithms for adjusting content based on user medical information for personalized rehabilitation during the breast cancer care continuum and obtaining positive user evaluation results.

A Systematic Review of Korea’s Medication Management Mobile Application

“…To increase the use of mobile apps, effective and intuitive apps are needed, and strategies for increasing their use are required (Muzyka, 2022;Vaniukov, 2022). The issue of the safety and quality of health apps has recently been raised (Chun et al, 2020;Parker et al, 2019) as it is somewhat unregulated and unsupervised (Lim et al, 2020). In particular, the importance of a solid institutional framework that is urgently needed in Korea has been recognized (Kim et al, 2021;Yong, 2022).…”

“…Given the ever-growing market for medical apps, a quality assessment that goes beyond the current star rating system was necessary. Due to their potential impact on patients, medication management apps require careful assessment and only a few have been validated among the commercially available health apps in Korea (Lim et al, 2020).…”