Evaluation of the Quality and Usability of the Chinese Versions of Sleep Self-Management Smartphone Applications：A Review (Preprint)

Abstract

Mobile apps have been developed for all aspects of everyday life. Among these, the number of mobile health apps is also increasing. At present, the English version of sleep self-management applications have been reported to be of poor quality, and no articles on the evaluation of sleep self-management applications have been published in China, so the current status of sleep self-management applications in Chinese is unclear.

The objective of this article was to describe and evaluate the status, quality, and usability of the Chinese versions of sleep self-management smartphone applications.

Using "Sleep", "Sleep Management", "Sleep Monitoring" and "Sleep Tracking" as search words, we searched for the Chinese versions of sleep self-management smartphone applications in the Apple App Store on the iPhone operating system (iOS), and Google Play and the Huawei AppGallery on the Android operating system. After applying strict inclusion and exclusion criteria, the Chinese version of the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the user version of the Mobile Application Rating Scale (uMARS) were used to evaluate the usability and quality of applications in the sample.

The sample comprised 32 eligible applications. The functions of the applications predominantly included notification, instruction, data recording (collection, sharing, evaluation), display, reminders. We found that the Chinese version of the sleep self-management smartphone applications had poor usability and quality using the Chinese version of the SUS and the Chinese version of the uMARS. Among the applications in the sample, 40.63% were given the rating “F”, which was unacceptable; 31.25% were rated “D”; 18.75% rated “C”; and only 3 were rated “A” (n=1) or “B” (n=2), accounting for 9.38%. Among the three sub-dimensions of uMARS, user participation scored the lowest, at 3.0.

At present, the Chinese versions of sleep self-management smartphone applications available in the App Store were few in number, and of poor quality and low availability. The Chinese versions of applications for sleep self-management still present an opportunity for development. Therefore, future developers should focus on being user-centered, through multi-disciplinary, and multi-team collaboration, to develop a high-quality Chinese version of a sleep self-management smartphone application.