As the coronavirus (Covid-19) continues to spread globally, governments and public health institutions look to contact tracing to help isolate and contain outbreaks. The more traditional manual contact tracing approach initially adopted in Ireland is both time and resource intensive, and may struggle to identify all contacts quickly enough, before they cause further transmission. In contrast, the efficiency and responsiveness of a digital approach using the proximity sensors in smartphone devices has the potential to limit delay and catch a greater number of contacts [1].
Key to the effectiveness of these digital solutions, however, is the percentage take-up of the app across the population, with one study in the UK [2] recom-mending the epidemic could be suppressed with 80 percent of all smartphone users using the app. This equates to 56 percent of the population overall.
1.1 Motivation
Analysis of the public’s response to the initial release of the HSE Contact Tracker app [3] can help guide the system’s evolution towards maintaining, and expanding, the uptake and ongoing use of the app to fight Covid-19 in Ire-land. It can do so by informing on user refinements to aspects like its usability, functional effectiveness, and performance. The voluntary nature of participa-tion in the use of the app, combined with the requirement for a critical mass of users across the country to make the app effective, makes such feedback a crucial tool in the campaign to defeat the spread of the virus.
To that end, this research [4] [5] analysed all app reviews of the HSE app on the AppStore [6] and Google Play [7] using seven different aspects of inter-est: General Characteristics, Usability, Functional Effectiveness, Performance, Data Protection, Autonomy (of users), and Overall (generic comments). This analysis focused on ’positive’ and ’negative’ sentiment expressed by the user under each of these aspects, in order to build on areas well received, and to target areas where future releases of the app could be refined.
1.2 HSE App Overview
Ireland’s Health Service Executive released the COVID Tracker app (see Fig 1), developed by Nearform, across the Apple and Google online app stores in early July 2020.
Built on the Google and Apple Exposure Notification API (GAEN), it uses Bluetooth and anonymous IDs to log any other phone with the app it is in close contact with – tracking the distance and the time elapsed. Every 2 hours the app downloads a list of anonymous IDs that have been shared with the HSE by other users that have tested positive for Covid-19.
If a user has been closer than 2 metres for more than 15 minutes with any of these phones they will get an alert that they are a close contact. The app runs in the background
Beyond the core contact tracing technology lies additional voluntary self-reporting functionality – users can choose to log daily health status or symp-toms via the Check-In option, and also to share their age, group, sex and locality. Also optional is the ability to share a contact phone number so the HSE can contact them.
1.3 Pillar Derivation
The analysis process in this research involved coding user-reviews into 7 as-pects, henceforth called pillars: General Characteristics, Usability, Functional Effectiveness, Performance, Data Protection, Autonomy (of users), and Over-all (generic comments). These pillars were derived and refined through an iterative 6-phase process:
– A bottom-up approach, where individual contact tracing applications were evaluated for derivation of important app characteristics;
– A parallel academic/grey(media) literature review of app/health-app eval-uation papers, to the same end;
– Cluster analysis, to create an amalgamated framework that revealed dis-tinct super-categories (the pillars). This was refined via team review for redundancy and sufficiency;
– A Devil’s Advocacy phase where individual ’pillar owners’ were challenged by another member of the team to assess the characteristics in that pillar for sufficiency, relocation, and relevance. This was followed by a full team critique of the pillars against the same criteria.
– Application of the resultant framework against the HSE app, to evaluate the framework further, leading to refinement of the pillars and character-istics.
– Application of the framework against four other contact tracing apps using different architectures, tracing technologies and data guidelines: SafePaths [8], Corona-Warn [9], Aman [10] and Novid [11].
1.4 Research Questions
In order to inform the evolution of the HSE Covid Tracker app going forward the following two research questions were formulated:
- How do users perceive the HSE Covid Tracker app version 1.0.0?
- What are the prevalent issues users have with the HSE Covid Tracker app, V 1.0.0?
An ancillary analysis also probes the commonalities and differences be-tween Apple and Android users to assess if there are any platform-specific issues that arose and to see how common the profiles are across the two sets of users.
1.5 Structure
In the next section, we discuss the method followed for data gathering and analysis, and then we present our results. Finally, the discussion section focuses on our findings, and potential recommendations for improving the efficiency of the app towards limiting the Covid-19 pandemic.