Investigating and prioritising different issues in wearable apps: An spherical Fuzzy-DEMATEL approach

The growing availability of applications (apps) for smart gadgets has been phenomenal in recent years. Both independent developers and multinational corporations are working to boost their app ratings in order to stay competitive in the mobile app industry. Therefore, it is crucial to consider apps from the perspective of the end user. In recent years, there has been a meteoric rise in the use of wearable apps. However, there have been surprisingly few investigations of the difficulties inherent with wearable apps. The purpose of this research is to mine user evaluations in order to get an understanding of consumer concerns about wearable apps. In this paper, fifteen app issues have been identified. Then we applied the DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method to analyse the wearable app issues (WIs) and divide these issues into cause-and-effect groups. To begin, multiple experts assess the direct relationships between influential issues in wearable apps. The evaluation results are presented as spherical fuzzy numbers (SFN). Secondly, convert the linguistic terms into SFN. Thirdly, based on DEMATEL, the cause-effect classifications of issues are obtained. Finally, the issues in the cause category are identified as WIs in wearable apps. The outcome of the research is compared with the other variants of DEMATEL, like rough Z-number-based DEMATEL and spherical fuzzy DEMATEL, and the comparative results suggest that spherical fuzzy DEMATEL is the most suitable method to analyse the interrelationship of different issues in wearable apps. The outcome of this work definitely assists the app and software industry in the successful identification of the issues on which professionals and project managers could really focus.