Introduction: Various types of healthcare smartphone applications (apps) have been released in recent years, making it possible for people to manage their health anytime and anywhere. As a healthcare provider, who has the responsibility to provide guidance as to which apps can be used? The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate an evaluation tool for the various aspects of healthcare smartphone apps.
Materials and methods: In the first phase, a provisional version of an evaluation tool for healthcare smartphone apps was developed from a review of previous studies. In the second phase, the provisional tool was modified and edited after verification by five experts with regard to its content validity. In the third phase, from September 25 to October 4, 2013, 200 responses were collected to verify the construct validity and reliability of the tool.
Results: The edited tool had 23 evaluating items with three evaluating factors along with seven subevaluating factors as a result of confirmatory factor analysis. The reliability was found to be high (0.905).
Conclusions: This study is meaningful because it demonstrates a healthcare smartphone app evaluation tool that is proven in terms of its validity and reliability. The evaluation tool developed and tested in this study is an appropriate and widely applicable tool with which to evaluate healthcare smartphone apps to determine if they are reliable and useful. However, this evaluation tool represents the beginning of the research in this area.
Keywords: evaluation tool; healthcare; mobile health; smartphone application.