13 Apr Authentication and usability in mHealth apps

Mobile health (mHealth) apps have been adopted in healthcare areas such as the management of diabetes, the monitoring of physical activities and the treatment of HIV. The users of mHealth may be patients with handicaps such as motor impairments, difficulties to remember and psychiatric conditions. Hence, assumptions normally made on other types of apps, like the user’s ability to type or remember a password, might not hold in the mHealth area. This paper evaluates how different authentication approaches impact mHealth apps usability. Second, we present new metrics to evaluate ease-of-use and third, we evaluate the usability of two common authentication approaches for mHealth apps via several key process aspects and their impact on users. Based on these results, we propose a QR-Code based authentication approach for mHealth apps, which helps overcome common impediments faced by mHealth apps users.

Teng Z, Zhang P, Li X, Nock W, Rodriguez-Cancio M, White J, Schmidt DC, Gilmore D, Nesbitt JC. Authentication and usability in mHealth apps. In2018 IEEE 20th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom) 2018 Sep 17 (pp. 1-6). IEEE.