Functional and Non-Functional Requirements of Virtual Clinic Mobile Applications: A systematic review (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Virtual Clinic Mobile Application (VCMA) is a valuable vehicle for management and remote monitoring of patients under different medical conditions. It can reduce the burden on outpatient services and provide follow-up options for patients who do not require a physical examination. A clear understanding of the recent literature can help identify appropriate functionalities for new development and future refinement of current applications (apps). OBJECTIVE This review study endeavored to identify functional and non-functional requirements for VCMA. METHODS This study integrates requirements of VCMA published in PubMed, Scopus, ISI Web of Science, Science Direct, ProQuest and IEEE databases in English, from database inception up to April 2022 by sing the systematic search technique. 76 of 1223 articles on VCMA met the inclusion criteria. This way, their requirements were extracted and categorized by the conventional content analysis. RESULTS Two main themes and 8 subthemes in terms of VCMA requirements were extracted as follows: 1) Functional requirements with 3 subthemes (Demographic data documentation, Health record, General features of user interface (UI)); 2) Non-functional requirements with 5 subthemes (Usability, Accessibility, Compatibility, Efficiency, and Security). CONCLUSIONS The findings underscored the mHealth solutions for virtual care and the need for development of the apps regarding the extracted functional and non-functional requirements for VCMA; however, controlled trials are needed. It is recommended that transparent reporting of mHealth interventions needs to be prioritized to enable effective interpretation of the extracted data.