Socio-Technical Challenges and Mitigation Guidelines in Developing Mobile Healthcare Applications

Mobility is among the most popular phenomena of this era. Through the use of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and notebooks, computing is widely emerging on mobile phones. Since smartphones are the most available, popular, and useful portable device, they have gained unprecedented acceptability compared to other devices. Furthermore, hundreds of applications are added to the Play Store and iTunes daily, and the number of smartphone applications has long surpassed one billion. With recent smartphones, a focus on healthcare is being emphasized. Due to the emergence of mobile applications and the software engineering principles applied to mobile computing are not prominent or mature, it is important to identify the common risks that hinder mobile application development, especially healthcare applications. Thus, this paper addresses the risks faced by mobile application developments, particularly eHealth applications. The paper results include a description for selecting risks and proposes a mitigation strategy for overcoming development risks to ensure the construction of effective, secure, standard, and results-oriented healthcare applications beneficial to humanity.