Reliability And Validity Of The Chinese Version Of The Mhealth APP Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ) And Its Application

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study is to introduce the usability questionnaire(MAUQ)of the patient version of interactive mHealth APP,in order to provide an effective tool for the usability evaluation of the patient version of interactive mHealth APP in China.After obtaining the authorization of translation,the Chinese version of MAUQ is formed through translation,back translation,cross-cultural adaptation and reliability and validity verification.The Chinese version of MAUQ is used to investigate the user population of the patient version of an interactive mHealth APP,and try to evaluate the usability of the APP according to the data analysis results.MethodsThis study is divided into two parts.1.Translation and verification of questionnaire.With the authorization of Professor Leming Zhou,author of the original MAUQ questionnaire,the Brislin translation model was used to guide the translation of the questionnaire.After forward translation,back translation,crosscultural adaptation and pre-experiment,the preliminary Chinese version MAUQ questionnaire was formed.Using convenience sampling method,346 users of good doctor online patient version were selected to investigate the reliability and validity of the questionnaire.The quality of items in the scale was evaluated by item analysis.Cronbach’s a coefficient,retest reliability and split half reliability were used for reliability test,Item-level Content Validity Index and the Average of Scale-level Content Validity Index were used to measure the content validity of the questionnaire.Exploratory Factor Analysis,Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Convergent Validity was used to test the structure validity of the questionnaire.2.Questionnaire survey.The Chinese version of MAUQ was used to evaluate the usability of the patient version of an interactive mHealth APP,and 260 users of the APP were selected by convenient sampling method for investigation.The research tools were general information table and Chinese version MAUQ,and the statistical methods were descriptive analysis and multiple linear regression.Results1.After translation and cross-cultural adaptation,the expression of the questionnaire content conforms to the Chinese cultural background and expression habits.The verified Chinese version of MAUQ has 21 items and 3 dimensions:ease of use and satisfaction(8 items),system information arrangement(6 items),and usefulness(7 items).The Cronbach’s a coefficient of the total questionnaire was 0.912,and Cronbach’s a coefficients of each dimension were 0.912,0.884 and 0.907,respectively.The half-fold reliability of the total questionnaire was 0.701,and the half-fold reliability of each dimension was 0.916,0.888 and 0.908,respectively.The retest reliability of the total questionnaire was 0.869,and the retest reliability of each dimension was 0.840,0.853 and 0.809,respectively.Seven experts were invited to evaluate the content validity of the Chinese version of MAUQ questionnaire.The content validity index of each item of the questionnaire ranged from 0.857 to 1.000,and the scale-level content validity index was 0.952.Correlation analysis was used to study the correlation between the questionnaire and the three dimensions,and all showed significant correlation values of 0.797,0.711 and 0.760,respectively.3 common factors were extracted in the Exploratory Factor Analysis,and the cumulative contribution rate of variance was 63.83%,the load value of each item on the corresponding common factor was more than 0.40.The results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis were as follows:χ2/df=1.820,NFI=0.920,IFI=0.962,TLI=0.957,CFI=0.962,GFI=0.922.AGFI=0.904,RMSEA=0.049,which met the adaptation standard.2.After investigating the users of an interactive mHealth APP,the total average score of the APP usability evaluation questionnaire was(1.626±0.702),and the average scores of each dimension were as follows:ease of use and satisfaction was(1.634±0.733),arrangement of system information was(1.703±0.781)and usefulness was(1.551 ±0.705).The lowest average of the item was(1.5000±0.788)and the highest average of the item was(1.838±1.031).Multiple linear regression analysis showed that the gender,age,education level,occupation and monthly family income of the patient version of an interactive mHealth APP user did not become the main influencing factors affecting the APP usability score,which explained the 1.7%variation of the questionnaire score.Conclusions1.The Chinese version of MAUQ questionnaire has good reliability and validity in the context of Chinese culture,and can be used as a usability evaluation tool for the patient version of interactive mHealth APP.2.The Chinese version of MAUQ is preliminarily applied to evaluate the usability of the patient version of an interactive mHealth APP.The results show that the APP has relatively high overall usability.The evaluation of the usability of the APP shows that the APP needs to be further optimized in terms of operation interface,problem handling and information feedback to improve the user experience.