Evaluation of Cross-platform Development Tools for Patient Self-Reporting on Mobile Devices

Kim, H.J., Karunaratne, S., Regenbrecht, H., Warren, I. and Wunsche, B.C.

Western societies are aging rapidly and novel solutions must be found to make healthcare more effective and affordable. One step towards this goal are mobile applications for patient self-reporting. The tools provide healthcare professionals with improved monitoring data, whereas patients benefit from a reduced number of doctor visits and improved diagnosis and treatment. In order to make self-reporting tools as accessible as possible they must be affordable, easily accessible, and easy to use. Smartphones are an ideal platform for patient self-reporting tools, but development is made complicated by the lack of standardised operating systems and development frameworks. In this paper we evaluate popular cross-platform mobile application development tools. They are evaluated against a generalizable simple patient self-reporting application scenario called “Feelometer”. We show that PhoneGap is currently one of the most suitable technologies for that purpose. It creates applications of similar look and feel as natively developed applications. However, memory usage and application startup time are worse than for natively developed applications and not all necessary functionalities for telehealth applications are supported.

Cite as: Kim, H.J., Karunaratne, S., Regenbrecht, H., Warren, I. and Wunsche, B.C. (2015). Evaluation of Cross-platform Development Tools for Patient Self-Reporting on Mobile Devices. In Proc. 8th Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2015) Sydney, Australia. CRPIT, 164. Maeder, A. and Warren, J. Eds., ACS. 55-61

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