EAUHHCAMA: Extending and Adapting Usability Heuristics for Healthcare Related Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Abstract

Fitness related context-aware mobile applications (FCAMA) being the fragment of healthcare informatics, use emerging technologies and provide continuous and real-time information to the end-users. This information supports the users in understanding the physical condition and the way to improve health using cues. That's why; healthcare informatics is the fast-growing domain of interest for researchers. FCAMA has collected information from inbuilt smartphone tools including accelerometer, GPS, microphone, camera, and others. FCAMA transformed the extracted data into a usable form and formulated individual plans to track and improve fitness. But, it is ambiguous whether the user interfaces of FCAMA is really effective in improving health and fitness. Although, several studies attempt to establish an effective usability evaluation mechanism, it still needs further work for comprehensively identifying usability flaws. Evaluators of FCAMA use inspection based heuristics set to identify user-related issues. In order to identify the usability issues comprehensively, it is important that heuristics are pertinent. In this paper, we propose an enhanced and adapted set of fourteen usability heuristics for FCAMA. Eleven heuristics were selected and adapted after cross-linking the usability flaws with the existing sets of heuristics. Usability flaws were captured in a user study with 850 students from the human-computer interaction (HCI) course. While we added two more against uncaptured usability flaws, to be able to adapt the heuristics set to the context awareness aspect. The FCAMA was validated using two evaluation studies conducted by students in (HCI) course, and second by usability experts. Results have justified the proposed heuristics both in terms of effectiveness and relevance.