Designing an Indoor Air Quality Monitoring App for Asthma Management in Children: User-Centered Design Approach

Abstract

Background Indoor air pollution is a well-known risk factor that triggers and exacerbates asthma, the most common pediatric chronic disease. Using a mobile app to monitor indoor air quality could be promising in engaging children in keeping their indoor air quality clean and healthy as secondary environmental prevention for asthma management. However, no app is available to allow children to monitor, assess, and improve their indoor air quality. Objective This study aims to design a mobile app that encourages children to monitor indoor air quality and track their asthma conditions through a user-centered, iterative design approach. Methods We reviewed existing apps for indoor air quality monitoring or asthma management for children and conducted two sets of semistructured interviews with 12 children with asthma. We then iteratively created prototypes and evaluated and revised them. Results Participants raised a series of outstanding questions on the prototype features and content that described their needs and perspectives, which informed the final designs. Following the identified requirements and recommendations, we developed two versions of the app: AirBuddy for presenting concrete information for indoor air quality and AirPet for gamifying the practice of monitoring indoor air quality. Conclusions By following an iterative, user-centered design process, we developed two versions of an app to encourage children with asthma to monitor indoor air quality and track their asthma condition. The user-centered design approach revealed two crucial aspects that require deeper consideration when creating a child-friendly app, including balancing brevity and expressivity and considering the longitudinal effects of gamification. As a next step, we plan to conduct a longitudinal deployment study to evaluate the real-world effects of our apps.

A Mobile App for Children With Asthma to Monitor Indoor Air Quality (AirBuddy): Development and Usability Study

“…To achieve the goal, we employed a user-centered design process whereby designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process by putting users at the center of product design and development [ 26 ]. Previously, we conducted a series of design studies, including reviewing existing systems, brainstorming ideas, wireframing, and high-fidelity prototyping, through which we iteratively revised and improved the app to assure that children can use it efficiently, effectively, and reliably [ 21 ]. Building on the previous work, this paper reports on a system development and its 2-month field deployment, the last step of a user-centered design process, in which we investigated how potential users would use AirBuddy in real-world settings.…”

“…One of our key design considerations was to ensure children’s sustained engagement with AirBuddy and thus sustain them to monitor IAQ over time. To serve this goal, we first considered implementing gamification features in the app design in the previous work [ 21 ], which has been widely employed to keep users, particularly children, hooked to the system [ 38 , 39 ]. However, we eventually discarded the idea for the following reasons.…”

“…Specifically, we aimed to adopt an iterative, user-centered design approach by involving potential users throughout the design process to employ their perspectives in design. Previously, we investigated children’s perspectives and design requirements through a review of existing applications and 2 sets of semistructured interviews with 12 children with asthma [ 21 ]. Based on the findings from these previous studies, we developed AirBuddy, a mobile app that visualizes air quality indoors and outdoors in a child-friendly manner.…”

Monitoring ambient air pollution and pulmonary function in asthmatic children by mobile applications in COVID-19 pandemic

“…Another study in the United States developed an app to monitor air pollutants for asthmatic children. Nevertheless, the app still needs to be evaluated in a real-world setting ( Kim et al, 2021b ). Currently, studies on collecting air pollutants using smartphone apps and assessing their association with asthma outcomes in the pediatric population still need to be made available.…”

Co-design of an Augmented Reality Asthma Inhaler Educational Intervention for Children: Development and Usability Study

“…In 2016, Schneider et al [23] highlighted the importance of developing an app in collaboration with a cohort of young people with asthma. However, to our knowledge, few studies since then have been published on a user-centered design process in asthma [23][24][25][26][27].…”