Towards Better mHealth Apps: Understanding Current Challenges and User Expectations

Mobile health (mHealth) apps have become ubiquitous and offer several different features to provide a better health outcome for end-users. While the availability of thousands of mHealth apps offers a great many options for consumers, they also introduce several challenges if needing to use more than one app. We designed an anonymous survey based on constructs of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) and the Value Proposition Canvas to collect data on the user experience (UX) around these challenges. We surveyed 70 people over the age of 18 having experience with mHealth apps and found issues such as limited customizability, unwanted and redundant features, and data entry challenges that lead to a degraded UX overall. These challenges are also valid from a developer's point of view where they spend significant efforts in developing these redundant or unneeded features for more than one platform. In this paper, we discuss these user challenges and emerging implications for mHealth app developers.