Sentiments prediction and thematic analysis for diabetes mobile apps using Embedded Deep Neural Networks and Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Abstract

The increasing reliance on mobile health for managing disease conditions has opened a new frontier in digital health, thus, the need for understanding what constitutes positive and negative sentiments of the various apps. This paper relies on Embedded Deep Neural Networks (E-DNN), Kmeans, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for predicting the sentiments of diabetes mobile apps users and identifying the themes and sub-themes of positive and negative sentimental users. A total of 38,640 comments from 39 diabetes mobile apps obtained from the google play store are analyzed and accuracy of 87.67 % ± 2.57 % was obtained from a 10-fold leave-one-out cross-validation. This accuracy is 2.95 % - 18.71 % better than other predominant algorithms used for sentiment analysis and 3.47 % - 20.17 % better than the results obtained by previous researchers. The study also identified the challenges of diabetes mobile apps usage to include safety and security issues, outdated information for diabetes management, clumsy user interface, and difficulty controlling operations. The positives of the apps are ease of operation, lifestyle management, effectiveness in communication and control, and data management capabilities.