Exploring progressive web applications for health care : Developing a PWA to gather patients' self assessments

Abstract: Many health care providers aim to become more patient-centered, and developing mobile health applications for patients might help achieve this. In the light of this, this thesis explores if the progressive web application (PWA) concept is suitable for mobile health applications. It is investigated by developing a PWA intended to be used to gather health care patients’ self assessments. The work follows the double diamond design process with: a discover phase containing a literature study, interviews with experts, and partaking in a workshop; a define phase where system requirements are specified; a develop phase with lo- and mid-fi prototypes as well as usability tests with six test users; and a deliver phase where the application is implemented using Polymer 2.0 and web components. To furthermore assess the patients satisfaction of a PWA, an evaluation phase is conducted where eleven test users tries it during five consecutive evenings and answers a survey at the end. The general opinions were that they thought it worked good and was easy to use, indicating that a PWA can be suitable for this purpose. Following this and discussions of findings, we suggest guidelines for how to design and implement a PWA for similar projects. However, the developed PWA was due to shortage of time not completely finished and the test users support for PWA features were rather limited, so future investigation is recommended to determine if PWAs are suitability in this context.