Smartphone-based application for training outpatient cardiac rehabilitation: Design and usability evaluation

Due to the increasing trend of heart diseases and their complications, programs such as cardiac rehabilitation can reduce the complications and faster recovery of patients. Therefore, the aim of this study was to design and evaluate the usability of smartphone-based application for training outpatient cardiac rehabilitation.

This applied-developmental study was conducted at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in 2019. In order to specify the app information content and feature, a checklist was designed based on the relevant literature and opinions cardiologists (10 peoples) and nurses (10 peoples). The application was designed and developed in JAVA environment and on the Android operating system. The usability evaluation was performed using the think aloud method and the System Usability Scale questionnaire by cardiac patients (10 peoples), nurses (10 peoples) and cardiologists (10 peoples).

The most important information contents were education, diet, physical activity and medications and the most important features were, pulse count, harmful cholesterol level record, Body mass Index calculation and triglyceride levels chart display. Usability evaluation showed that patients, nurses and cardiologists rated the application at a desirable level with mean score of 74.25, 74.5 and 75.36, respectively.

Based on the userschr('39') opinions in this study, smartphone_based applications had potential to transfer educational contents to heart patients to prevent acute cardiac events, lifestyle modification and rehabilitation education.