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

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 the basis of environmental secondary prevention for asthma management. No app is available, however, to allow children to monitor, assess, and improve their indoor air quality. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to design a mobile app that encourages children to engage in monitoring indoor air quality and tracking their asthma conditions through a user-centered, iterative design approach. METHODS We conducted a review of existing applications and two sets of semi-structured interviews with 12 children with asthma, through which we iteratively created prototypes and evaluated and revised them accordingly. 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 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.