Using Health Forum Data to Assess User Needs for mHealth App Development: A Feasibility Study on Alzheimer’s Disease (Preprint)

BACKGROUND User needs assessments have become increasingly essential in the development of mobile health technology but may be hindered by time and resource restraints. Analyzing online health forum data may provide a substitute for in-person assessments and could provide the data necessary to inform mobile-based application development. OBJECTIVE : A feasibility study was conducted to determine whether forum posts on Alzheimer's disease could 1) help identify patient and caregiver needs to inform application design and 2) determine whether these needs can be identified automatically by classic text clustering methods. METHODS Posts on an Alzheimer's disease forum were collected and subsequently analyzed through a manual thematic coding process and used to generate user personas. The personas were compared and contrasted with personas collected through in-person interviews. Concurrently, the posts were clustered using hierarchical clustering algorithms. An external evaluation was conducted to compare the automatic and manual clusters. RESULTS A total of 413 forum posts were collected. The thematic coding process yielded three themes and nine subthemes with a high level of agreement between coders. The themes helped inform four distinct user personas. The external evaluation showed fair to substantial scores for the similarity between the automatic and manual labels. CONCLUSIONS Forum posts can be useful in understanding patients and caregiver needs. The personas based on the forum posts can provide a broader view of user needs, while the personas generated from the in-person interviews support developing a deeper understanding of user needs. Automated clustering algorithms achieved a fair performance in clustering the forum posts to match the manually derived themes. More research is needed to improve the clustering algorithm performance to facilitate user needs assessment in mobile app development. CLINICALTRIAL N/A