Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Jun 11, 2024)
Date Submitted: Aug 30, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Functional and Non-Functional Requirements of Virtual Clinic Mobile Applications: A systematic review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Virtual Clinic Mobile Application (VCMA) is a valuable vehicle for management and remote monitoring of patients under different medical conditions. It can reduce the burden on outpatient services and provide follow-up options for patients who do not require a physical examination. A clear understanding of the recent literature can help identify appropriate functionalities for new development and future refinement of current applications (apps).
Objective:
This review study endeavored to identify functional and non-functional requirements for VCMA.
Methods:
This study integrates requirements of VCMA published in PubMed, Scopus, ISI Web of Science, Science Direct, ProQuest and IEEE databases in English, from database inception up to April 2022 by sing the systematic search technique. 76 of 1223 articles on VCMA met the inclusion criteria. This way, their requirements were extracted and categorized by the conventional content analysis.
Results:
Two main themes and 8 subthemes in terms of VCMA requirements were extracted as follows: 1) Functional requirements with 3 subthemes (Demographic data documentation, Health record, General features of user interface (UI)); 2) Non-functional requirements with 5 subthemes (Usability, Accessibility, Compatibility, Efficiency, and Security).
Conclusions:
The findings underscored the mHealth solutions for virtual care and the need for development of the apps regarding the extracted functional and non-functional requirements for VCMA; however, controlled trials are needed. It is recommended that transparent reporting of mHealth interventions needs to be prioritized to enable effective interpretation of the extracted data.
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.