Healthcare Android apps

A tale of the customers’ perspective

Conference paper (2019)

Authors

Mariaclaudia Nicolai University of Salerno
L. Pascarella Software Engineering - EEMCS
F. Palomba University of Zürich
A. Bacchelli University of Zürich
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Software Engineering Healthcare Mobile Applications
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Published Date

2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Healthcare mobile apps are becoming a reality for users interested in keeping their daily activities under control. In the last years, several researchers have investigated the effect of healthcare mobile apps on the life of their users as well as the positive/negative impact they have on the quality of life. Nonetheless, it remains still unclear how users approach and interact with the developers of those apps. Understanding whether healthcare mobile app users request different features with respect to other applications is important to estimate the alignment between the development process of healthcare apps and the requests of their users. In this study, we perform an empirical analysis aimed at (i) classifying the user reviews of healthcare open-source apps and (ii) analyzing the sentiment with which users write down user reviews of those apps.
In doing so, we define a manual process that enables the creation of an extended taxonomy of healthcare users’ requests. The results of our study show that users of healthcare apps are more likely to request new features and support for other hardware than users of different types of apps. Moreover, they tend to be less critical of the defects of the application and better support developers when debugging.