VERIFICATION OF BODY SURFACE AREA-CALCULATING ANDROID APPS

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

Smartphone applications (“apps”) are seeing rapid adoption in healthcare because they offer numerous benefits, e.g., tailoring patients’ treatments to their specific body measurements. Despite the importance of accurate calculation in this domain, currently such apps do not undergo formal correctness verification, opening the door to incorrect treatment or dosages, and ultimately negative treatment outcomes. This paper takes a step towards correctness verification, focusing on Body Surface Area (BSA) calculation; BSA is used in scenarios where accuracy is crucial, e.g., to determine drug dosages, chemotherapy dosages, or fluid replacement for burn patients. First, we show that the two most common formulas for BSA, Mosteller and Du Bois, can produce divergent BSA values for the same individual, differing by as much as 14%. Next, we verify BSA-calculating apps from Google Play; we identified 23 such apps, and performed a systematic testing of their user interaction and calculation. Our study has revealed several kinds of errors: incorrect calculations, crashes, or failure to specify a reference formula.

Identifier

85207096554 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9789898704597]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the International Conferences on Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2024, BigDaCI 2024; Connected Smart Cities 2024, CSC 2024; and e-Health 2024, EH 2024

First Page

133

Last Page

140

Grant

CCF-2106710

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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