Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Oct 30, 2023
Date Accepted: Jun 24, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Development and usability testing of Where I Go: A mobile application to assess environmental/sociocultural/physical influences on women’s moment-to-moment toileting decisions.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Women with lower urinary tract symptoms report more frequent unhealthy toileting behaviors and while these behaviors are associated with lower urinary tract symptoms, a cause-and-effect relationship has not been identified. Investigations to address this relationship has relied on the use of surveys and validated questionaries and diaries that are limited by risk of recall bias and do not assess the decision-making or other real time contextual factors that may influence toileting.
Objective:
Develop, construct, and test usability of a mobile application named Where I Go. This application allows women to report real-time decisions and behaviors around toileting for urination.
Methods:
The Cordova development framework allowed for simultaneous build on both Android and iOS platforms. To test usability, we recruited women to download and use Where I Go over two days and provide feedback at the end. The primary outcome measure was the System Usability Scale (SUS, 0-100 range) and secondary outcome the functionality subscale of the Mobile Application Rating Scale (fMARS, 1-5 range). We estimated a minimal sample size of 40 women for an a priori SUS cut point score of 74.
Results:
Forty-four community-dwelling women were recruited with mean age of 44 years (range 21-85), majority Non-Hispanic White (57%), college educated (57%) and annual income less than $75,000 (62%). Forty-one (93%) completed the full 2-days of Where I Go data collection and filled out the SUS and fMARS surveys embedded at the end. The SUS mean score was 78 (95% CI: 74.7-81.4), indicating that Where I Go scored better than 75-80% of the 500 products tested by the developers of the SUS scale. The fMARS mean score was 4.4 (95% CI: 4.2, 4.6) representing a functionality rating of “good” by users.
Conclusions:
Where I Go is a novel mobile application that shows promise for collecting real-time data on factors that inform women’s decisions about when and where to toilet. It demonstrates above average usability scores. Clinical Trial: not applicable
Citation
