Development and evaluation of a self-care mobile application for viral hepatitis patients

Mobile-based self-care applications can help patients with hepatitis increase their awareness about various aspects of the disease. This study aimed to develop and evaluate a self-care mobile app for viral hepatitis.

This study was conducted in three steps. In the first step, a questionnaire containing 24 topics in four sections was used to determine the potential app contents. In the second step, the app was developed using the Android Studio 3 development environment and Kotlin programming language. In the third step, the quality of the app was evaluated using mobile app rating scale (MARS). The Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction (QUIS) was used to evaluate user satisfaction.

A high priority was given to the following contents of the medical and health information section; describing ways of transmitting hepatitis (81.7%), dealing with high-risk behaviors (80.6%), and methods of preventing hepatitis (79.6%). The MARS and QUIS evaluations’ results showed that the quality of the app and the user satisfaction with it were at a good level.

Since according to the participants, the topics related to the “medical and health information” section were the most important contents, we recommend addressing this part in designing other self-care apps.