JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The availability and use of mobile apps in health and nutrition management is increasing. Ease of access and user-friendliness make nutrition apps an important ally in the efforts of their users to lose and manage weight. To promote motivation for long-term use and to achieve results, it is necessary to better understand the opinions and needs of users of nutrition apps.

Objective:

This study aims to identify the key ideas and issues that users highlight in their reviews of nutrition apps at Google Play Store. Identifying the topics that users frequently mention when reviewing these apps, together with user ratings for each of these apps, allows us to identify the areas where further improvement of the apps could facilitate the use of the apps and support the users' weight loss and intake management efforts.

Methods:

We have collected 72,084 user reviews from Google Play Store for 15 nutrition apps that allow their users to track and count calories. After a series of text processing operations, two text-mining techniques (topic modeling and topical n-grams) were applied to the series of user reviews of nutrition apps.

Results:

Using the topic modeling technique, 11 separate topics were extracted from the pool of user ratings. The results show that most users are generally satisfied with the apps they use (4.4 out of 5 is an average rating for 15 apps). Most topics refer to the positive evaluation of the apps and their functions. Negatively rated topics mostly refer to app charges and technical difficulties users encounter. Among the most frequently mentioned topical trigrams (3-word combinations), we have identified the positive and negative ones. The usability and functionality (tracking options) of apps were rated positively on average. Negative ratings were associated with the trigrams related to adding new food, technical issues and app charges.

Conclusions:

The motivation of the users to use their app over a longer period of time could improve the achieved results. While the user reviews generally show positive opinions and ratings of the apps, app developers should pay more attention to the technical problems of the users and inform the users about the expected payments, their refund and cancelation policies in order to increase user loyalty.