JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The development and use of mobile health (mHealth) applications for asthma management has risen dramatically over the past two decades. Asthma applications (apps) vary widely in their content and features, prior research has rarely examined preferences of users of publicly available apps.

Objective:

The goals of this study were to provide a descriptive overview of asthma mobile apps that are publicly available and to assess the usability of asthma apps currently available on the market to identify content and features of apps associated with positive and negative user ratings.

Methods:

Reviews were collected on June 10, 2019 and included public posted reviews until June 01, 2019. To characterize features associated with high or low app ratings, we first dichotomized the average user rating of the asthma app into two categories: a high average rating and a low average rating. Asthma apps with average ratings of four and above were categorized as having a high average rating. Asthma apps with average ratings of less than four were categorized as having a low average rating. For the sentiment analysis, we modeled both two word (bi-gram) and three word (tri-gram) phrases which commonly appeared across highly rated and low rated apps.

Results:

Among the 41 asthma apps reviewed included in our analyses, a total of 732 reviews were examined across all apps. Among apps reviewed, 64% received high ratings (average ratings of 4 or 5) and 36% received low ratings (average ratings of 3 or less). The number of ratings across all applications ranged from 223 (AsthmaMD) to 1 (MyAsthmaApp). Twenty- nine percent of applications were available on both Android and iOS platforms; fifteen percent of asthma apps had been updated within the last year. From the sentiment analysis, key features of asthma management that were common among highly rated apps included tracking of peak flow readings, development of action plans, and asthma symptom monitoring.

Conclusions:

Our study results demonstrate that despite wide availability of asthma apps across Android and iOS platforms, use of asthma apps remains low. Results from sentiment analyses of app reviews indicate that perceived asthma app quality, maintenance and updates vary widely across apps and platforms. These findings may call into question the long-term engagement with asthma apps, a crucial factor for determining their potential to improve asthma self-management and asthma clinical outcomes.