Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Cancer
Date Submitted: Nov 5, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 5, 2024 - Dec 31, 2024
Date Accepted: Jul 28, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Exploring feature preferences for a treatment-accompanying app in patients undergoing radiation therapy – a cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
mHealth apps are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, including in radiotherapy. At the same time adherence is often low. One way to increase adherence is to incorporate patient preferences into the development of the apps.
Objective:
Thus, the aim of the study to explore the importance of patient preferences for functions of a therapy-accompanying app in radiotherapy. Furthermore, we investigated possible associated factors with importance of app functions.
Methods:
A cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted with patients undergoing radiotherapy between summer 2021 and winter 2022. The subjective importance of a total of 18 functions of a treatment-accompanying app was recorded. Analyses were carried out at the level of the individual items. Associations with possible predictors were examined using multiple hierarchical regressions, with age, gender, previous experience with mHealth apps, education and supportive care needs as factors.
Results:
N=84 radiotherapy patients took part in the survey, 53% of whom were male. The average age was 62±12.5 years. The functions with the highest importance of a health app were security against hacking (59.7% extremely important) and sending messages when something changes in the treatment (42.9% extremely important). Explained variances in the analyses ranged between R2=0.35 and R2=.05 in the regression analyses. A younger and an older age as well as previous experience with mHealth apps were the most important predictors for the subjective importance of functions.
Conclusions:
Patients during radiotherapy rate the importance of features in a therapy-accompanying app differently. Findings might be used to develop mHealth apps. Clinical Trial: DRKS00020362
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