Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Feb 7, 2022
Date Accepted: Mar 31, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
User-Centered Design and Evaluation of AirBuddy, a Mobile app for Children with Asthma to Monitor Indoor Air Quality
ABSTRACT
Background:
Indoor air quality is an important environmental factor that triggers and exacerbates asthma, the most common chronic disease in children. A mobile app to monitor indoor air quality could help occupants keep their indoor air quality clean and healthy. However, no app is available that allows children to monitor and improve their indoor air quality.
Objective:
Previously, we conducted a series of user-centered design studies to identify user needs and design requirements towards creating a mobile app that helps children with asthma to engage in monitoring and improving indoor air quality as part of their asthma management. Based on the findings from these studies, we created AirBuddy, a child-friendly app that visualizes air qualities indoors and outdoors.
Methods:
This paper reports on the findings from a field deployment with seven pediatric asthma patients, where we evaluated AirBuddy’s usability and usefulness in real-world settings by conducting a weekly, semistructured interview for eight-weeks.
Results:
All participants positively responded to the usefulness and usability of AirBuddy, which we believe is thanks to the iterative, user-centered design approach that allowed us to identify and address potential usability issues early and throughout the design process.
Conclusions:
This project contributes to the field of mHealth app design for children by demonstrating how a user-centered design process can lead to the development of digital devices that are more acceptable and relevant to target users’ needs.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.