Better Identifying and Addressing Diverse Issues in mHealth and Emerging Apps Using User Reviews

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live, leading to a rapid expansion of  mHealth apps usage. The pandemic also led to the introduction of a large number of "emerging apps" to the mobile app market. mHealth and emerging app users have reported a range of serious issues in their user reviews, which we identified and better understood after extracting, translating, analysing and classifying over 6 millions user reviews of these apps into different aspects. As evidenced by user reviews, many mHealth and emerging apps are plagued by major issues and problems. App developers could improve the quality and adoption of their apps if they had a better grasp of the major concerns raised by their users. We also link the findings from our user review analysis to the app version history release notes to better understand and identify what issues the developers of mHealth/emerging apps managed to solve or not. Investigating the association between user reviews and app updates will allow us to design a model for mHealth/emerging app developers to follow. We identified that our recommendation models and tools can assist mHealth/emerging app developers and designers in proactively identifying and preventing software and design issues before their final apps are deployed to mobile users. A proactive evaluation model and discovering mHealth/emerging issues early can save billions of dollars and avert millions of deaths a year. As a result, more people will download these apps when they believe that the updates are actually addressing and solving their problems, which will result in saving lives and improving the quality of life for people with disabilities or those who use these apps.

Project Lead

Prof John Grundy, Dr Omar Haggag

Collaborators

Mohamed AbdelRazek, Sherif Haggag

Papers

  • Haggag, O., Haggag, S., Grundy, J.C., Abdelrazek, M., COVID-19 Vs Social Media apps: Does privacy really matter?, 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, online 23-29 May 2021, IEEE -- Final publication available at DOI Author pre-published version PDF
  • Haggag, O., Grundy, J.C., Abdelrazek, M., Haggag, S., Better Addressing Diverse Accessibility Issues in Emerging Apps: A Case Study using COVID-19 Apps, 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems 2022 (MobileSoft 2022), May 2022, Pittsburg, USA. -- Final publication available at DOI Author pre-published version PDF
  • M. Fazzini, H. Khalajzadeh, O. Haggag, Z. Li, H. Obie, C. Arora, W. Hussain, J. Grundy, Characterizing Human Aspects in Reviews of COVID-19 Apps, 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems 2022 (MobileSoft 2022), May 2022, Pittsburg, USA. -- Final publication available at DOI Author pre-published version PDF
  • Omar Haggag. 2022. Better Identifying and Addressing Diverse Issues in mHealth and Emerging Apps Using User Reviews. In The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2022 (EASE 2022), June 13–15, 2022, Gothenburg, Sweden. -- Final publication available at DOI Author pre-published version PDF
  • Haggag, O., Grundy, J.C., Abdelrazek, M., Haggag, S. A Large Scale Analysis of mHealth App User Reviews, Empirical Software Engineering, vol 27, 196, 2022, Springer. -- Final publication available at DOI Author pre-published version PDF

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