ISO/IEC 25010 Based Evaluation of Free Mobile Personal Health Records for Pregnancy Monitoring

Background: Mobile Personal Health Records (mPHRs) are mobile applications that allow organizing and saving the patients' health data in order to ease their management and access for both patients and doctors. Objective: This study aims to evaluate, based on ISO/IEC 25010 quality standard, the software quality of mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring. Method: An External quality evaluation was carried out on 17 pregnancy monitoring mPHRs for iOS and Android. The evaluation consisted of performing a set of tasks and filling in a quality assessment questionnaire that covers the four External quality characteristics: Functional suitability, Operability, Performance efficiency and Reliability. Moreover, 14 mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring were used to study the relationship between the External quality and the Quality in-use by means of four classification techniques: Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3), C4.5, K-nearest neighbors (K-NN) and Naïve Bayes. Results: Functional suitability and Reliability are the most covered quality characteristics by the 17 apps compared to Operability and Performance efficiency. Furthermore, K-NN and C4.5 obtained the highest accuracy rates, as evaluating the accuracy rate of each classification technique can determine if a classifier can be designed to predict the Quality in-use from the External Quality for the apps used in this study. Conclusion: The need of studying the relationship between fulfilling the External quality and the Quality in-use for pregnancy monitoring mPHRs, is of great importance for the developers of these apps for future improvements. © 2017 IEEE.