Environmental Hazards and Behavior Change: User Perspectives on the Usability and Effectiveness of the AirRater Smartphone App

Abstract

AirRater is a free smartphone app developed in 2015, supporting individuals to protect their health from environmental hazards. It does this by providing (i) location-specific and near real-time air quality, pollen and temperature information and (ii) personal symptom tracking functionality. This research sought to evaluate user perceptions of AirRater’s usability and effectiveness. We collected demographic data and completed semi-structured interviews with 42 AirRater users, identified emergent themes, and used two frameworks designed to understand and support behavior change—the Behavior Change Wheel (BCW) and the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM)—to interpret results. Of the 42 participants, almost half indicated that experiencing symptoms acted as a prompt for app use. Information provided by the app supported a majority of the 42 participants to make decisions and implement behaviors to protect their health irrespective of their location or context. The majority of participants also indicated that they shared information provided by the app with family, friends and/or colleagues. The evaluation also identified opportunities to improve the app. Several study limitations were identified, which impacts the generalizability of results beyond the populations studied. Despite these limitations, findings facilitated new insights into motivations for behavior change, and contribute to the existing literature investigating the potential for smartphone apps to support health protection from environmental hazards in a changing climate.

Citizen Science for One Digital Health: A Rapid Qualitative Review of Studies in Air Quality with Reflections on a Conceptual Model

“…Partnerships representing national agencies and/or government departments were indicative of projects with larger geographical coverage, such as CAPTOR (Schaefer et al 2020) and AirRater (Workman et al 2021). These were also aligned with the support of national government funding schemes and research priority areas.…”

“…Across the studies, smartphones were used for presenting and sharing air quality data among participants. In Smell Pittsburgh (Hsu et al 2020), PRAISE-HK (Che et al 2020) and AirRater (Workman et al 2021), smartphones were used to crowdsource air quality data at specific times and locations. The AirLouisville smartphone app also incorporated data in the form of respiratory symptoms linked to a smart asthma inhaler used to record the number of "puffs" (Barrett et al 2018).…”

“…Data collection from mobile and passive sensors focused on a common data point: particulate matter, i.e., PM2.5. Tropospheric ozone (O3) was monitored in outer urban areas, where air quality monitoring stations can be scarcer (Schaefer et al 2020;Che et al 2020;Workman et al 2021). Apps used by volunteers to crowdsource localised air quality indicators provided data in some studies (Hsu et al 2020).…”

“…Some civicfunded initiatives used a combination of official monitoring stations and public-contributed data to support street level and personalised health monitoring needs, such as PRAISE-HK, which used fine-scale monitoring algorithms to detect air quality in outdoor and indoor settings, and on different modes of transport (Che et al 2020). The integration of multiple data points, including environmental and public health data, also featured in the AirRater (Workman et al 2021) and AirLouisville (Barrett et al 2018) projects. The latter resulted in 1.2 million data points relating to particulate matter, combining more than 251,000 smart inhaler medication puffs with over 5 million environmental data points (Barrett et al 2018).…”

Real‐world data using mHealth apps in rhinitis, rhinosinusitis and their multimorbidities

“…This app is available in English and is particularly tailored for Australia. A study assessed AirRater users by means of semi‐structured interviews, with most of them indicating that information provided by the app helped them to make decisions and implement behaviours to protect their health 26,52 …”