This past month a scientific paper by the LactApp R+D team was published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics (1). According to the Journal of Citation Reports (JCR) of 2021, this journal has an impact factor of 4.730, belonging to the 23rd position out of a total of 109 indexed in the category “Health Care Sciences & Services”. Therefore, this journal ranks in the first quartile (Q1) and the first tertile (T1) in the corresponding JCR listing.

At LactApp, we want to improve breastfeeding care and to do so, we need a powerful corpus of knowledge. 

This time, we have validated and adapted the m-Health App Usability Questionnaire scale (MAUQ) to the LactApp environment.  The MAUQ questionnaire is a validated scale to assess the usability and utility of a mHealth app.

This questionnaire was originally developed by Zhou et al. in 2019 (2). It consists of 18 items with 3 subscales and uses a 7-point Likert scoring system: 7 (strongly agree), 6 ( agree), 5 (somewhat agree), 4 (neither agree nor disagree), 3 (somewhat disagree), 2  disagree), and 1 (strongly disagree). The questionnaire score is the total score for each item divided by the number of items. The closer the value is to 7, the higher the usability of the mHealth application. 

The MAUQ has been translated into Malay and Chinese (3,4), and the original questionnaire has also been adapted to an eye donation promotion system application (5). 

The adaptation of the questionnaire has been conducted according to health translation guidelines and cross-cultural adaptation to achieve equivalence between the original and translated versions.

For this purpose, once permission was obtained from the author, it was translated into Spanish by a professional translator. The reverse translation was verified by translating the Spanish version into English. Then, a group of experts, including scale validation experts, computer engineers, lactation consultants, and data analysts, compared the translated version with the original questionnaire and made modifications to make the questionnaire more understandable for Spanish readers and for breastfeeding users.

Finally, the questionnaire was validated by 227 LactApp users.

This new tool will be used in future studies and may help to gather more information on how to support breastfeeding more effectively.

The full article can be accessed through the following link: Spanish version of the mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ) and adaptation to breastfeeding support apps.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1386505623000801

References: 

1. Quifer-Rada P, Aguilar-Camprubí L, Gómez-Sebastià I, Padró-Arocas A, Mena-Tudela D. Spanish version of the mHealth app usability questionnaire (MAUQ) and adaptation to breastfeeding support apps. Int J Med Inform. 2023;174:105062.

2. Zhou L, Bao J, Setiawan IMA, Saptono A, Parmanto B. The mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ): Development and Validation Study. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2019 Apr 11;7(4):e11500.

3. Mustafa N, Safii NS, Jaffar A, Sani NS, Mohamad MI, Abd Rahman AH, et al. Malay version of the mhealth app usability questionnaire (M-MAUQ): Translation, adaptation, and validation study. JMIR mHealth uHealth [Internet]. 2021;9(2).

4. Zhao S, Cao Y, Cao H, Liu K, Lv X, Zhang J, et al. Chinese Version of the mHealth App Usability Questionnaire: Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validation. Front Psychol [Internet]. 2022;13(February):1–12.

5. Chumkasian W, Fernandez R, Win KT, Petsoglou C, Lord H. Adaptation of the MAUQ and usability evaluation of a mobile phone–based system to promote eye donation. Int J Med Inform [Internet]. 2021;151(August 2020).