Identifying Asbestos-Containing Materials in Homes: Design and Development of the ACM Check Mobile Phone App

Background: Asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) can still be found in many homes in Australia and other countries. ACMs present a health risk when they are damaged or disturbed, such as during do-it-yourself home renovations. However, community members lack knowledge and awareness about asbestos identification and its safe management in residential settings. Objective: The objective of our study was to describe the process of developing a mobile phone app, ACM Check, that incorporates a questionnaire designed to identify and assess ACMs located in residential settings. Methods: A multidisciplinary team was involved in the formative development and creation of the mobile phone app. The formative development process comprised 6 steps: defining the scope of the app; conducting a comprehensive desktop review by searching online literature databases, as well as a wider online search for gray literature; drafting and revising the content, questionnaire, conditional branching rules, and scoring algorithms; obtaining expert input; manually pretesting the questionnaire; and formulating a final content document to be provided to the software development company. We then constructed ACM Check on the iOS platform for use in a validation study, and then updated the app, replicated it on Android, and released it to the public. Results: The ACM Check app identifies potential ACMs, prioritizes the materials based on their condition and likelihood of disturbance, and generates a summary report for each house assessed. Conclusions: ACM Check is an initiative to raise community members’ awareness of asbestos in the residential environment and also serves as a data collection tool for epidemiologic research. It can potentially be modified for implementation in other countries or used as the basis for the assessment of other occupational or environmental hazards. (JMIR Formativ Res 2017;1(1):e7) doi:10.2196/formative.8370