Mobile health applications
: a natural language processing review analysis

  • Maximilian Dominique Paul Simmerer (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

As smartphone use becomes ubiquitous, mobile health (mHealth) is becoming increasingly important. The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to the increasing download rate of mHealth applications, as alternative healthcare solutions are sought by citizens restricted due to public health measures. Further evidence is necessary in order to prove if there was an increasing positive perception of healthcare applications by the population. This dissertation seeks to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate this by studying the evolution of objective data like reviews and ratings of preselected mHealth applications in the Google Play Store during 2020. Further analysis focused on customer behavior is necessary to establish conditions and practices that support continuous growth and stability for mHealth providers. In order to analyze the mHealth applications development as well as the content of the reviews, natural language processing (NLP) tools were used. There is no published research or similar studies analyzing mHealth reviews with NLP tools for 2020. The results indicated no clear trend towards increasing positive perception of mHealth applications. Customer preferences were gathered and categorized by the ‘Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology’ framework. The analyzed mHealth applications showed insights in form of different preferences in accordance with their respective subgroups. One main finding of this study was how the technical composition of mHealth applications can strongly influence the customer perspective. Furthermore, the study reveals missed opportunities if form of cooperation between regulators, application developers and insurances.
Date of Award3 May 2021
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorHenrique Martins (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Natural language processing
  • Word and key feature analyses
  • mHealth
  • Reviews
  • Google Play Store
  • Ratings
  • COVID-19
  • Applications
  • Healthcare
  • Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology

Designation

  • Mestrado em Gestão e Administração de Empresas

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