Improving The Usability of Personal Health Record in Mobile Health Application for People with Autoimmune Disease

Abstract

Personal Health Record (PHR) is a technology that usually is targeted to people with chronic illness or in the elderly and designed to supplement medical care with health monitoring outside traditional care environments in hospitals such as in person-visits through a mobile application. The widespread adoption and use of PHRs will not occur unless it provides good usability for users. Autoimmune is a condition where an immune system response attacks its host. There are 80+ types of autoimmune diseases. Some autoimmune diseases are life-threatening, and most are debilitating and require a lifetime of treatment. The variability in the development of daily symptoms and the condition of the patients with autoimmune disease increases the need for PHR. Thymun is a mobile application made for people with autoimmune disease and contains PHR as its main feature. In this study, we do a usability evaluation in the previous iteration and also gather the needs and problems that patients have with their traditional way of monitoring their health. After the founded usability problems and new found needs we then redesign the product in the 2nd iteration and then conduct usability evaluation. It was found that the feature with the smallest usability score is symptoms recording. The results of the interview after the test obtained qualitative information about the problems experienced by participants when undergoing the test and the participants’ perceptions as users of the application design when using the prototype. Finally, a post-test survey was carried out using the SUS test instrument, which obtained a usability score of 74. The 2nd iteration has a better satisfaction rate,mission usability score and more positive remarks.