Maintenance Notice

Due to necessary scheduled maintenance, the JMIR Publications website will be unavailable from Wednesday, July 01, 2020 at 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM EST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Who will be affected?

Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors

Date Submitted: May 16, 2024
Date Accepted: Jan 19, 2025

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

The mChoice App, an mHealth Tool for the Monitoring of Preexposure Prophylaxis Adherence and Sexual Behaviors in Young Men Who Have Sex With Men: Usability Evaluation

Dos Santos FC, Brin M, Tanner MR, Galindo CA, Schnall R

The mChoice App, an mHealth Tool for the Monitoring of Preexposure Prophylaxis Adherence and Sexual Behaviors in Young Men Who Have Sex With Men: Usability Evaluation

JMIR Hum Factors 2025;12:e59780

DOI: 10.2196/59780

PMID: 40019786

PMCID: 11887583

The mChoice: usability evaluation of a mHealth tool for PrEP adherence monitoring and sexual behaviors for young men who have sex with men

  • Fabiana Cristina Dos Santos; 
  • Maeve Brin; 
  • Mary R Tanner; 
  • Carla A Galindo; 
  • Rebecca Schnall

ABSTRACT

Background:

Background:

Mobile health (mHealth) applications (apps) provide easy and quick access for users to monitor their health-related activities. Features such as medication reminders help users adhere to their medication schedules and automatically record these actions, thereby helping track their overall health management. Due to insufficient mHealth tools tailored to Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) preventive care for young men who have sex with men (MSM), our study evaluated the usability of the mChoice app, a tool designed to enhance pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) adherence and promote sexual health (e.g., encouraging the use of condoms and being aware of the partner’s HIV status and PrEP use).

Objective:

To apply systematic usability evaluations to test the mChoice app and to refine the visualizations to better capture and display patient-reported health information.

Methods:

Methods:

Usability testing involved heuristic evaluations conducted with five experts in informatics and user testing with twenty young MSM who were taking or eligible to take PrEP.

Results:

Results:

Participants demonstrated satisfaction with the appearance of the mChoice app, reporting that the app has an intuitive interface to track PrEP adherence. However, participants highlighted areas needing improvement, including chart titles and the inclusion of ‘undo’ and ‘edit’ buttons to improve user control when recording PrEP use.

Conclusions:

Conclusions:

Usability evaluations should be considered in the app’s development to ensure the effectiveness of the app’s future iterations.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Dos Santos FC, Brin M, Tanner MR, Galindo CA, Schnall R

The mChoice App, an mHealth Tool for the Monitoring of Preexposure Prophylaxis Adherence and Sexual Behaviors in Young Men Who Have Sex With Men: Usability Evaluation

JMIR Hum Factors 2025;12:e59780

DOI: 10.2196/59780

PMID: 40019786

PMCID: 11887583

Download PDF


Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.

© 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.