Abstract:

M-health applications have been gaining importance in the recent years and has been the focus of many researchers due to its advantages of effective service delivery with cost-effective mechanisms. The existing m-health systems are reviewed in this paper and many issues are identified with them, which are mostly user-centric. Whilst there are recognised standards, such as ISO 13407, which highlight the need for user centric development, the majority of application development considers low user involvement in the development process, which either results in developing a system that does not fulfil the outlined objectives or only partially doing so. Considering this issue, an agile user centred design methodology for developing an m-health patient management system is proposed. In addition, an online questionnaire-based survey and interviews are conducted for assessing the users’ needs and expectations from this patient management m-health system. The interview and survey results indicate that cost, ease of use, accuracy, privacy, security, effectiveness, durability, adaptability, support, learnability and enjoyability are the important factors that need to be considered in a user centric design methodology. From the study, it is concluded that the results from the survey and interviews can be useful for designing and developing user centric m-health systems.

Keywords: User-Centred Development, M-health, Patient Management System, Software Engineering.