Mobile App Testing in Health Care

Latest Trends and Rise of mHealth Apps

As per the statistics, there are more than 318,000 apps related to healthcare and fitness available in iphones and android app stores and more that 52% of the smartphone users across the world use health and fitness related apps. That means more that 50% of the mobile users engage in health care apps in smartphones. It was found that in 2018 there were more than 7 million downloads of health related apps. These rich stats indicate the flourishing future for mhealth apps.

Well mhealth apps have helped in battling the covid pandemic to a great extend. Severely covid hit countries like China and Italy are using informative mobile apps to control the numbers of infection. Other countries like the USA, Australia, Germany and India are also actively using mobile applications to handle the turbulence of pandemic. As per the record India is using 19 covid mobile apps, amongst which the Arogya Setu app developed by indian government, has received 75 million downloads.It collects health data from each and matches it to the symptoms of corona infection. This process helps to determine the corona infection intensity of each user and passes the same information to all the travelers. So If you are travelling in a train or flight you will be indicated if a positive case is besides you.

Benefits of Health Care Apps

Gone are the days when doctors used the pagers to report the emergencies. Then came the smart phones to make the life better and now the mhealth apps are no less than boon for patients, doctors and medical staff. With the advent of smartphones we have gone through a digital transformation in a lot of sectors and even generally it has impacted the lives of millions. Now the time has come to utilise the digital advancements in the medical and healthcare ecosystem. Also we can see huge business investments mounting up to 19.5 million dollars already been made for digital healthcare campaigns and its been estimated that mHealth Technology market is set to grow to 60 billion by 2020.

Now let’s have an overview on the abundant benefits that can be derived from mHealth apps :

Health Care Apps are Blessing in Far Remote Areas

The internet and smartphone being accessible in remote and rural areas, the benefits of  mHealth apps can be reaped by people in remote areas. They can consult the doctor online and can also get the prescribed medicines to their doorsteps.

No Need for Patients to Visit the Doctor

We can see a lot of mhealth apps in which the doctor can be consulted through video calling. Snaps of allergies can also be sent for identification. It’s a boon for patients who are not able to consult the doctor physical clinics. He payments can be made online and even appointments can be scheduled in advance.

Healthcare Apps are Supportive for Doctors and Medical Staff

Healthcare apps are boon for doctors and medical staff as they can be updated about the patient’s health report in a timely manner. Also mhealth apps would help medical staff and doctors to maintain a good coloration.

Reduces Risk of Wrong Diagnosis

Mobile devices and wearable sensors can be used for tracking physical activity, health monitoring, and to detect drastic changes in the heart rate to send an alert to the emergency. There are so many symptom checkers available in the market like the diabetes symptom checker, fetching accurate results and keeping the users proactive and maintaining better self care. So these advanced medical practices will reduce the risk of incorrect diagnosis and also help in tracking medical progress for patients on a timely basis.

Challenges in Mobile App Testing of mHealth Apps

Multi Platform Support

As per the stats it is assumed that more than 1.7 billion users across the globe would rely on mobile apps to utilize health care applications. Also we have consistently witnessed a hike in the versatility of mobile phones like variations in Os and Os versions, Os and browser versions., browser and browser versions, different screen sizes, screen aspect ratio, form factor, etc. So we need to make sure that every health care app is optimized for key mobile devices across multiple operating platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows phone and different OS and browser variations, along with screen sizes etc.

Data Integrity and Accuracy

It is believed that the Healthcare industry is associated with a lot of sensitive information hence major emphasis should be put on strict authorization and access control. Electronic health Records should have access for authoritative personnels only. Informative content or the data in symptom checker apps should be correct and accurate enough to match customer requirements.

Security Breaches

Healthcare industry being on rise has a great possibility of getting exposed to internet vulnerabilities. Hence it is imperative to make sure that the mobile application is security compliant.

Performance

We can see a surge in the number of healthcare mobile applications, also as per records 52% of the app users use mhealth and fitness trackers. This prompts to maintain a quality streak for mhealth applications. Having a high loading speed, consuming less battery and storage space, easy navigation and engaging UI are some of the key permanence areas that should be considered while developing health care applications.

How pCloudy can Contribute to Enhancing the Quality of mhealth Applications

Before understanding how pCloudy helps in overcoming the challenges in testing a healthcare mobile application lets have an intro on pCloudy. pCloudy is a cloud based mobile application testing platform with more than 5000 device browser combinations. It is a comprehensive solution for increasing the speed of the app testing by enabling continuous testing. You can perform testing of both Android as well as IOS mobile applications on 100’s of mobile devices in pCloudy. It is loaded with Futuristic features like AI and predictive analytics to increase the speed of test automation.

One of the major challenges in healthcare mobile app testing is the device coverage and multi platform support ability. As mentioned above pCloudy supports more than 5000 device browser combinations ensuring testing of any kind of application. Also we can execute cross browser testing on more than 50 devices simultaneously. Above all it is highly scalable enabling to add or deselect any number of mobile devices for app testing. These features of pCloudy can be held reliable for covering mobile applications of different variations and especially health care applications.

The other challenge that we mentioned was data integrity. In pcloudy test data uploaded by any user is stored in a secured folder on our server in the Data Center. It is protected by username and password and is further protected by a layer of encryption. The data center of pCloudy is compliant with the global security standards like SSAE¬16 (SOC¬2) and ISO 270001.

pCloudy provides detailed test reports on the tests conducted on the apps. You can view the battery consumption, network speed, frame rendering time, CPU usage, memory usage, logs, videos, snapshots, etc. This will help you analyze the performance of your app and improve its usability.

Conclusion

In recent years we have witnessed a surge in the mobile healthcare industry, also it is estimated that the mhealth technology market is set to grow by 60 billion by 2020. These stats prove the dominance of the healthcare sector in the mobile app industry. Hence mobile app development organisations need to be gear up in developing the best technological solutions for developing mhealth apps. pCloudy is already in verge of providing [email protected] spanning different sectors and mhealth applications being on the top priority. The reason is that it has been consistent in developing innovative technological solutions.