Sentiment Analysis of User Feedback on the HSE Contact Tracing App

Abstract

Digital Contact Tracing (DCT) is seen as a key tool in reducing the propagation of viruses such as Covid-19, but it requires uptake and participation in the technology across a large proportion of the population to be effective. While we observe the pervasive uptake of mobile device usage across our society, the installation and usage of contact tracing apps developed by governments and health services globally have faced difficulties. These difficulties range across the user-populations’ issues with the installation of the apps, us-ability and comprehension challenges, trust in the efficacy of the technology, performance issues such as the effect on battery life, and concerns about data protection and privacy. In this work, we present our findings from a comprehensive review of the online user feedback relating to the initial release of the HSE Contact Tracker app, in an effort to inform later iterations and thus help sustain and potentially increase usage of the technology. While this might seem quite tightly scoped to the Irish context only, this app provides the basis for apps in many jurisdictions in the United States and Europe. Our findings suggest a largely positive sentiment towards the app, and that users thought it handled data protection and transparency aspects well. But feedback also suggested that users would appreciate more targeted feedback,more proactive engagement and also suggested that both the ‘android-battery’ issue and the backward-compatibility issue with iPhones seriously impacted retention/uptake of the app respectively.

A Benchmark Dataset for Sentiment Analysis of Users' Reviews on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Applications

“…The literature also provides several interesting works, where the feasibility of such mobile applications is carried out by analyzing people's response/feedback on these applications [22], [26], [27]. For instance, in [28] an online survey was conducted to analyze citizens' response to HSE 3 , a contact tracing application used in Ireland. During the survey, a reasonable percentage of the participants showed their intention of using the application.…”

“…There are already some efforts in this direction. For instance, Rekanar et al [3] provide a detailed analysis of users' feedback on HSE in terms of usability, functional effectiveness, and performance. However, the authors rely on manual analysis only, which is a timeconsuming process.…”

“…Manual contact tracing works only when the infected person knows who has been in physical contact with him/her, which reduces the effectiveness of the method. Moreover, manual contact tracing is a very time-and resource-consuming process [2], [3].…”

“…We believe an analysis of users' reviews on these applications will facilitate a better understanding of the concerns over these applications. There are already some efforts in this regard [3], [9], [10]. However, the majority of the methods rely on exploratory and manual analysis of the users' reviews, which is a resource and time-consuming process.…”

What do users think of the UK’s three COVID-19 contact-tracing apps? A comparative analysis

“…Several related papers, similar to this work, have been published, for example, a recent paper 10 focused on sentiment analysis of user reviews of the Irish app. Another recent paper 11 analysed the user reviews of apps of a set of 16 countries (UK was not included).…”