The App Rating Inventory: A Novel Method for Evaluating Mobile Apps (Preprint)

BACKGROUND A prodigious number of mobile health apps have flooded the market. The lack of guidelines for identifying high-quality apps from the overwhelming number of available apps creates confusion forestalling clinical adoption. OBJECTIVE The Defense Health Agency’s (DHA) Connected Health Branch developed the app rating inventory (ARI), an objective rating system with capability for broad application across condition areas. METHODS During the development of the ARI, three rounds of testing were conducted to enhance the tool’s performance, reduce redundancy, validate the ARI’s broad application, and assess potential subjectivity. RESULTS The ARI is a 28-item, three-criterion tool. The evidence criterion contains six items, and the content and customizability criterion each contain eleven items. Scoring is based on a simple binary system: either the app contains the feature or it does not. The 28 items are weighted equally; no one item is considered more (or less) important than any other. Each rated app receives four scores: a score for evidence, content, and customizability, and a total score (the sum of the three categories.). Higher scores indicate that the app obtained a positive score on more items than a similar app with a lower score. The evidence, content and customizability scores allow a clinician to make focused decisions when selecting an app for clinical use. CONCLUSIONS Using a two-phased process (market research followed by ratings), the ARI is able to evaluate apps for evidence, content and customizability. Scoring systems provide guidance; they filter down hundreds of apps in a disease category to a handful for consideration. Indeed, apps are not new medicine; in many cases, they are a novel delivery system for proven interventions.

Analysis of the status of providing specialized medical and preventive care to nephrological patients in Ukraine in 2020

Objective: rating evaluation of specialized medical and preventive care for renal patients in different regions of Ukraine and Kyiv in 2020 using the method of complex statistical coefficients. Methods. The basis for rating determination was the analysis of the components of specialized medical care for nephrological patients. The source of information was the data from the National Register of Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease and Patients with Acute Kidney Injury in 2020. Results. The rating of the regions of Ukraine and Kyiv in terms of specialized medical and preventive care for nephrological patients in 2020 has been determined. Conclusions: The status of specialized medical and preventive care for nephrological patients during 2020 has worsened in 13, in 5 remained unchanged, and only in 7 regions has improved. It is necessary to plan at least a 3-year program of implementation of governmental and regional measures to improve specialized medical and preventive care for nephrological patients.

Objective Rating of the Launch Behavior of Conventional, Hybrid and Electric Vehicles

The calibration of conventional, hybrid and electric drivetrains is an important process during the development phase of any vehicle. Therefore, to optimize the comfort and dynamic behavior (known as driveability), many test drives are performed by experienced drivers during different driving maneuvers, e.g., launch, re-launch or gear shift. However, the process can be kept more consistent and independent of human-based deviations by using objective ratings. This study first introduces an objective rating system developed for the launch behavior of conventional vehicles with automatic transmission, dual-clutch transmission, and alternative drivetrains. Then, the launch behavior, namely comfort and dynamic quality, is compared between two conventional vehicles, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and a battery electric vehicle. Results show the benefits of pure electric drivetrains due to the lack of launch and shifting elements, as well as the usage of a highly dynamic electric motor. While the plug-in hybrid achieves a 10% higher overall rating compared to the baseline conventional vehicle, the pure electric vehicle even achieves a 21% higher overall rating. The results also highlight the optimization potential of battery electric vehicles regarding their comfort and dynamic characteristics. The transitions and the gradient of the acceleration build-up have a major influence on the launch quality.

Examining the Quality of Individualized Education Plan (IEP) Goals for Children With Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate the quality of Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals for students with traumatic brain injury (TBI) using an empirically based rating instrument. One hundred twenty-five IEP goals for 49 students with TBI were coded using the Revised IEP/IFSP Goals and Objective Rating Instrument (R-GORI; Notari). Using this dichotomous measure, we analyzed the quality of IEP goals across six areas: observability, measurability, functionality, generalizability, application in daily tasks, and clarity of goals. On average, students had three IEP goals (range: 1–8). The average goal quality score was 3.74 (range: 1–6). While most of the goals were measurable, only a few contained details about how the goals could be generalized beyond the specific educational or therapeutic environment. These findings highlight variability in the quality of IEP goals, which may have implications to the therapeutic environment and child outcomes.

DigiMango: A Digital Postharvest Evaluation Tool on Mango Fruit

Mango is one of the most important fruits in the Philippines, with the Carabao variety being the most widely grown dominating the export market. However, the production of Carabao mangoes for export has dropped due to insect pests and diseases, resulting in serious postharvest decay. Anthracnose is the most common of these diseases. DigiMango is a mobile application that identifies the severity of anthracnose in Carabao mangoes during postharvest. The application offers to quantitatively evaluate the development of spot-like lesions on the surface of the mango and produce disease ratings. However, because this application is created for use in laboratory conditions, the mangoes used in the planning and testing were already pre-evaluated and the diseases pre-identified, with the application’s sole purpose providing convenience and objective rating evaluations to the researchers. The application was able to map the lesions by capturing the four sides of the mango using the smartphone’s camera and converted the process using a combination of the following: cannyedge detection, morphological transformation, contour approximation, and a thresholding algorithm. After thorough evaluation of the application, the study has proven that the use of the DigiMango application is acceptable and positively correlated with the experts’ rating. Any difference with the hedonic scales used by the researchers is not statistically significant.

ESTIMATION OF SKILLS FORMATION OF SWIMMING AMONG THE STRONGEST SWIMMERS-STUDENTS AT THE XXX WORLD UNIVERSIADE IN NAPLES-2019

In this article the dynamics of the rating of command performances of strongest swimmers-students according to the results of receiving prize-winning among men and women, participants-winners of the final Universiade in Naples-2019. Swimmers-winners, who won gold medals for men (900 points) and women (881) in “points” equivalent almost indistinguishable (19 points). We determine the ranking of team performance of different countries in the representatives of different sex in the distances of sports swimming according to the results of winning the medals at the start of XXX World Universiade in Naples-2019. The authors' collective was studied: a) revealing the ranking in the performance of team performance of male and female swimmers at the start of the World Universiade-2019; b) introduction of the results of the study into the practice of physical education and sports in order to identify an objective rating of the success of the team performance of swimmers-students. In addition, professional interest is in studying the evaluation of swimmers' results, having won awards with gold, silver and bronze medals. The results of our study identified the unconditional leaders (top ten) of student swimming at the XXX World Universiade in Naples2019: USA-40 medals (17 men + 23 women), Japan-20 (9 men + 11 women), Russia-18 (15 men + 3 women), Italy-11 (5 men + 6 women), South Africa-6 (2 men + 4 women), United Kingdom-6 (2 men + 4 women), Australia-5 (2 men + 3 women), Brazil4 (3 men + 1 woman), Germany-3 (3 women), Sweden- 1 (men) medal. This trend is also seen among the award-winning silver medals (886 respectively, and 863 points, the difference-23 points) and received bronze medals (respectively 874 and 852 points, the difference-22 points). Thus, in the general summary table of the rating of teams-participants in Naples-2019, it should be included, not only the existing state of qualitative indexes of medals (gold, silver, bronze), but first of all quantitative indicators. Since the generalized gender differences (887 + 865 = 1752 – Average 876 points), allows to assess the advantages of achievement in points.

Establishment of a Medication Acuity Scoring Tool at a Tertiary Pediatric Teaching Hospital: A 2-Phase Process

Background: Currently, there is no validated objective rating system to address the acuity of medication orders that pharmacists review. Objective: The objective was to assess the acuity of a given medication through creating and validating an acuity scoring tool. Methods: Phase I included the development of the medication acuity scoring tool (MAST) from national safety standards and clinical experience. A survey was administered to pharmacists nationwide to establish a consensus on the individual components of the tool and their associated weighted scores. Phase II was designed to assess MAST's predictive validity by comparing a medication acuity rating generated by MAST to a rating assigned based upon clinical experience of experts. Additionally, in phase II, interrater and intrarater reliability of MAST was evaluated. Results: In phase I, most of MAST’s components and their associated scores achieved >75% agreement for inclusion in the final tool. In phase II, without MAST, approximately 50% of pharmacist-assigned acuity ratings were statistically consistent with tool-generated acuity ratings, and there was fair agreement between respondents (k=0.31). With the use of MAST, agreement in acuity ratings improved to substantial (k=0.69), and intrarater reliability was almost perfect (k=0.88). Conclusion: MAST is a validated rating system that captures the acuity of medications.