JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Millions of visually impaired use mobile vision assistance apps to help with their daily activities. The most widely used vision assistance apps are magnifier apps. It is still largely unknown what the apps are used for. Lack of insight in the visual needs of visually impaired people is a hurdle for development of more effective assistive technologies.

Objective:

To understand how needs for visual aids may vary with social activities, by investigating the changes in the usage of a smartphone magnifier app when many users take breaks from work.

Methods:

The number of launches of the SuperVision Magnifier app was counted retrospectively from 2018 to 2020, from the active users worldwide. The fluctuation of app usage was examined by comparing weekday vs. weekend, Christmas/New Year vs. non-holiday seasons, COVID-19 lockdowns vs. the easing of restriction during the pandemic.

Results:

On average, the app was used 60,506 times by 14,585 users each week worldwide. Usage during weekends was 8% less than weekdays (p<0.001). There were two major trough points on the timeline of number of weekly app usage, one aligned with the COVID-19 lockdowns in April 2020, and another aligned with the Christmas/New Year week in both years of 2018 and 2019. The app launches declined by 6947 (p < 0.001) during the lockdown and by 5212 (p = 0.001) during the holiday weeks. There was no significant decline during March – May in 2019.

Conclusions:

The need for vision assistance technology was slightly lower when users were not at work, probably because the activities at home were different and less visually demanding. Nevertheless, for the whole user population, the needs for visual aids are still substantial.