Don't forget your pill!

Abstract

Despite the fact that a third of all cases of unintentional medication non-adherence are caused by simple forgetfulness, the majority of interventions neglect this issue. Even though patients have access to smartphone applications ("apps") designed to help them remember medication, neither their quality nor effectiveness has been evaluated yet. We report the findings of a functionality review of 229 medication reminder apps and a thematic analysis of their 1,012 user reviews. Our research highlights the gap between the theory and practice: while the literature shows that many medication regimens are habitual in nature and the presence of daily routines supports remembering, existing apps rely on timer-based reminders. To address this disparity, we present design requirements for building medication reminders that support the routine aspect of medication-taking and its individual nature, and demonstrate how they could be implemented to move from passive alerts to a smarter memory and routine assistant.

User Experience of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Apps for Depression: An Analysis of App Functionality and User Reviews (Preprint)

“…mood-tracking, discussion forums, reminders etc.) or visible on screenshots; this approach has also been used in other app reviews [43]. We also noted mentions of expert involvement in app creation (health professionals, researchers, etc.).…”

“…The analysis of publicly available app reviews has been successfully used in the past to investigate user attitudes towards existing apps and their feature requests [40][41][42][43][44]. We adopted this method to better understand users' attitudes towards CBT apps for depression and which features they use and find the most important.…”

“…In total, we downloaded 2,904 reviews from 24 apps (seven apps had 0 reviews). To identify reviews for the analysis, we followed the approach similar to the one used in [43]: first, the first author manually assessed all reviews, recording their sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and whether each mentioned at least one therapeutic feature; this was then discussed with other authors. Next, to qualitatively identify underlying themes, we used thematic analysis to analyse the subset of reviews that mentioned at least one therapeutic feature.…”

“…menstruation trackers [54]), they also need to ensure privacy: it was clear from the user comments that people shared their phones with others and thus would want to keep private the fact they use an app to support mental health. In exploring this area many lessons could be drawn from existing literature on behaviour change [21], health promotion [7] or medication adherence apps [43].…”

“…Significantly, via app reviews submitted to app stores, people using these apps have provided a large body of data regarding their user experiences, context of use and features they value. Previous work within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has demonstrated the benefits of using public reviews to investigate user attitudes towards and experiences of existing apps [40][41][42][43][44]. Researchers have analysed user reviews of mood tracking apps [44], looked at general use of health apps, e.g.…”