Analyzing Description, User Understanding and Expectations of AI in Mobile Health Applications

Previous research has studied medical professionals' perception of artificial intelligence (AI). However, there has been a limited understanding of how healthcare consumers perceive and use AI-powered technologies such as mobile health apps. We collected 40 popular mobile health apps that claim to have adopted AI, to study how AI is explained in these apps' descriptions, and how users react to it through app reviews. We found that four AI features (Recommendation, Conversational Agent, Recognition, and Prediction) are frequently used across seven health domains, including Fitness, Mental Health, Meditation and Sleep, Nutrition and Diet, etc. Our results show that (1) users have unique expectations toward each AI features, such as including feedback for recommendations, humanlike experience for conversational agents, and accuracy for recognition and prediction; (2) when AI is not adequately described, users make their own attempts to understand AI and to find out how (well) it works.