Steps to Develop a Mobile App for Pain Assessment of Cancer Patients: A Usability Study

Abstract

Health-related mobile apps have the potential to allow patients and providers to proactively and responsibly manage pain together. However, there is a gap between the science of pain and current mobile apps. To develop a prototype science-based pain assessment mobile app (PainSmart) for Android smartphones, pain assessment tasks were extracted from a clinical guideline. These tasks were then converted to activity diagrams and became the logic of PainSmart. Five participants diagnosed with breast cancer evaluated usability of PainSmart with the System Usability Scale. Patient experience was recorded using Camtasia Studio Version 9 software. The five participants were able to explore the pain app after only 20 minutes of training. Using the System Usability Scale with comments, participant mean usability score was 77.5; above 68 is considered an above average system. A prototype of a pain assessment mobile app for cancer patients demonstrated high usability and will be refined based on participant feedback.

An Examination of Nurses’ Acceptance of Mobile Health Applications

“…The total mean score of the "Needs subscale" is the highest total mean score of the nurses on the MAAM subscales. "Needs subscale" refers to the needs that drive an individual to use and satisfy the necessity of resorting to a mobile app (13,14,19). Another study conducted with nurses reported that 42% of nurses use mobile apps to meet their needs (the most frequent work-related smartphone activity was searching for work-related drug references) -and found that smartphones also helped nurses reduce work-related stress and improve unit cohesion and teamwork (12).…”

“…In the same study, nurses emphasized that if smartphones are used properly, they are certainly helpful tools for improving patient safety. Nurses make use of mobile apps to evaluate and relieve pain (18,19), apply therapy (20), provide postpartum care (21), deliver post-surgery care (22), promote healthy life behaviors (23,24) and reduce aggressive behaviors in children with special needs (25). All of these factors (reducing work-related stress, improving unit cohesion and teamwork, evaluating and relieving pain, applying therapy, providing postpartum care, delivering post-surgery care, etc.)…”

“…As the total score of the scale increases, the level of acceptance of the mobile application also increases. Needs, (items 1-7), Behavioral Intentions (items 8-13), Attitudes about Usage (items [14][15][16][17][18][19], Perceived Benefits (items 20-24), Subjective Norms (items 25-29) and Performance Expectations (items 30-32) make up the six sub-scales. Cronbach's alpha coefficients for the subscales are: Needs subscale, 0.861; Subjective norms subscale, 0.810, Attitudes about usage subscale, 0.816; Behavioral intentions subscale, 0.899, Perceived benefits subscale, 0.851, Performance expectations subscale, 0.788 (15).…”

Patient Experience from an eHealth Perspective: A Scoping Review of Approaches and Recent Trends

“…Usability, user-centered design, and participatory development of eHealth with patients: The articles on PX include studies with patient-centered design [44,38,47], usability evaluation [48], and research on users' experiences on acceptability of an intervention [37]. Study findings indicate that solutions designed with a patient-centered approach improved UX [38] and demonstrated high patient satisfaction scores [47].…”

“…(incl. qualitative and/or quantitative questions) [19,20,[22][23][24][25]28,29,34,40,43,46,[52][53][54][56][57][58]60] Interview [30,32,35,37,42,45,59] Focus group [36,41] Service analysis [31,51] Design methods [44] Reviews [26,39,49] Implementation study [18,21,50,61] Cross-sectional study [27,33] eHealth pilot or trial [38,43,47,48,55] The most frequently used method (i.e., surveys) was applied in 18 papers (see Figure 2). As patient satisfaction was one of the most mentioned aspects affecting PX, patient satisfaction surveys were the most broadly applied.…”