Towards Evaluating the Quality of Experience of Remote Patient Monitoring Services: A Study Considering Usability Aspects

The applicability of advanced mobile technologies in the m-Health domain has led to a number of studies and (limited) commercial products supporting delivery of health services to remote users. A key issue regarding successful delivery and acceptance of such services is meeting their Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements, focusing on technical aspects and end user perceived quality, respectively. In this paper, we address the topic of evaluating QoE for non-emergency remote patient monitoring services. We identify relevant QoE influence factors and metrics, and present the results of a QoE evaluation study, whereby we focus on usability aspects. The study involves 26 users testing a prototype version of the Ericsson Mobile Health service, which is based on a smartphone application and measurement of vital signs via medical sensors. The results show a strong correlation between QoE and: perceived effectiveness of the mobile interface (regarding both adequacy of smartphone screen size and smartphone application navigational support), perceived ease of conducting a blood pressure measurement task, and user motivation for service usage.