eHealth apps are mobile apps that help in self-management of critical illnesses, provide home-based disease management, and assist with personalized care through education, sensing, and interaction. Users of eHealth apps are naturally very diverse in terms of their human aspects, e.g., their emotional reactions to the apps, varying language proficiency, socioeconomic status, educational level, cognitive style, physical and mental challenges, gender, age, and personality. Unfortunately, many eHealth apps do not take these user differences sufficiently into account, making them ineffective or even unusable. This article presents our enhanced and actionable guidelines developed to better support human aspects in mobile eHealth apps. Some of these guidelines are specific, such as collecting minimal personal data or requirements, while others are more generic, applicable specifically to eHealth apps. We discuss how key human aspects, such as usability, accessibility, reliability, and validity, as well as diverse user issues can be addressed in practice with real-life eHealth app examples. We then collected feedback from expert mobile app developers, software engineers, and other relevant eHealth app stakeholders to assess the usefulness and applicability of the proposed guidelines and to identify areas where further refinement and development are needed.

eHealth apps are mobile apps that help in self-management of critical illnesses, provide home-based disease management, and help with personalized care. Users of eHealth apps are naturally very diverse in terms of their human aspects, e.g., their age, gender, emotional reactions to the apps, cognitive style, physical and mental challenges. Unfortunately, many eHealth apps do not take these user differences sufficiently into account, making them ineffective or even unusable. This paper reports a study from eHealth app stakeholders’ – developers and end-users – perspectives on critical challenges and benefits of better incorporating human aspects into eHealth app development and usage. We also investigate how different human aspects are being addressed by developers, which ones are the most important for different user groups, and which ones are currently missing/poorly handled. A mixed-method approach that integrates qualitative and quantitative research was used for this study. We gathered and analyzed data from 240 online survey responses and 25 detailed interviews within the same study and validated the results. We report key issues encountered in eHealth app design, difficulty in addressing different human aspects, areas requiring further research and practical assistance, and recommend our findings to best address these challenges. We found addressing human aspects throughout the app development life-cycle is beneficial for more effective eHealth apps. Our findings also suggest the need for improved standards and guidelines, better developer-user collaborative culture, and better human aspects education to produce more effective eHealth apps. This paper investigates current approaches used in the eHealth app domain that take into account the human aspects of app users. The paper guides eHealth app stakeholders, future researchers, academia and industry partners be aware of human aspects related challenges and improve produce apps.

Classifying mobile apps based on their description is beneficial for several purposes. However, many app descriptions do not reflect app functionalities, whether accidentally or on purpose. Most importantly, these app classification methods do not work if the app description is unavailable. This paper investigates a Reverse Engineering-based Approach to Classify mobile apps using The data that exists in the app, called REACT. To validate the proposed REACT method, we use a large set of Android apps (24,652 apps in total). We also show REACTs' extendibility for malware/anomaly detection and prove its reliability and scalability. However, our analysis shows some limitations in REACT procedure and implementation, especially for similar feature based app grouping. We discuss the root cause of these failures, our key lessons learned, and some future enhancement ideas. We also share our REACT tools and reproduced datasets for the app market analyst, mobile app developers and software engineering research communities for further research purposes.

Health-related mobile applications are known as eHealth apps. These apps make people more aware of their health, help during critical situations, provide home-based disease management, and monitor/support personalized care through sensing/interaction. eHealth app usage is rapidly increasing with a large number of new apps being developed. Unfortunately, many eHealth apps do not successfully adopt Human-Centric Issues (HCI) in the app development process and its deployment stages, leading them to become ineffective and not inclusive of diverse end-users. This paper provides an initial assessment of key human factors related to eHealth apps by literature review, existing guidelines analysis, and user studies. Preliminary results suggest that Usability, Accessibility, Reliability, Versatility, and User Experience are essential HCIs for eHealth apps, and need further attention from researchers and practitioners. Therefore, outcomes of this research will look to amend support for users, developers, and stakeholders of eHealth apps in the form of improved actionable guidelines, best practice examples, and evaluation techniques. The research also aims to trial the proposed solutions on real-world projects.