User Experience and Security in Digital Health Applications: Results from a Rapid Review

In recent years, a growing interest has been in the adoption of medical web or mobile applications or more in general applications in the digital health (DHEAL) field. These applications are designed for a wide range of users, from novice to expert and also end-users with and without disabilities, without adequately considering their unique software security needs. In this short paper, we present the results of a Rapid Review (RR) to identify existing approaches and methods to assess User Experience (UX), usability, accessibility and/or security in DHEAL applications. This RR has been conducted in the context of a research project ('DHEAL-COM Digital Health Solutions in Community Medicine). Among the others, the objective of DHEAL-COM is to delve into the complex relationship between UX (and its variants, like usability and accessibility) and security, i.e., to understand to what extent the principle of acceptability in security is taken into account when developing DHEAL applications. The outcomes of our RR should provide evidence to the stakeholders involved in the DHEAL-COM project and to researchers and practitioners who work in the DHEAL context. The findings of our RR emerge from 39 papers and can be summarized as follows: (i) there are several methods to assess usability; (ii) the most common methods are focused only on common usability aspects and in a few cases these methods concerns accessibility and credibility of the content; (iii) there are several methods to assess security and most of them are dictated by legislative rules; (iv) although the difficulty in finding a compromise between usability and security is clear in many cases, there are neither solutions nor approaches to deal with both of them.