Researchers in Iran have designed and evaluated a smartphone-based self-care application for patients who have undergone coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), one of the most common open-heart operations worldwide. The study, published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, was motivated by a gap the authors identified in their national context: although mobile applications for medical education have gained considerable attention in recent years, no effective application specifically designed for post-open-heart-surgery care existed in Iran to educate patients on self-care after cardiac surgery.
The project was described as applied research focused on technology development, carried out in four phases during 2024 and 2025. In the first phase, the team identified the educational needs of patients undergoing CABG by reviewing relevant literature and articles. The second phase involved collecting self-care content from credible sources, which produced 41 educational topics presented in both text and video formats; these were then validated by experts. In the third phase, the application itself was designed and approved by specialists. The fourth phase was a formal usability evaluation in which 35 patients who had undergone cardiac surgery assessed the app using the standardized Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction, a validated instrument known as QUIS. Data were analyzed with SPSS version 21 using descriptive statistical methods.
Among the 35 participants, 60.0% were male, 57.1% were aged 51 to 60 years, and 51.4% had a high school diploma or lower educational attainment.
The usability results were strongly favorable. Overall, 91.4% of the patients rated the application as good, 5.7% rated it as moderate, and only 2.9% rated it as poor. The mean overall evaluation score for the application was 7.9, with a standard deviation of 1.032, on a scale ranging from 0 to 9. The highest mean scores were recorded for two dimensions: user learnability, at 8.2 with a standard deviation of 0.84, and overall application capabilities, at 8.6 with a standard deviation of 0.54.
The authors concluded that the developed smartphone-based self-care application demonstrated favorable usability and user satisfaction among patients undergoing CABG, and that it may serve as a complementary digital tool to support post-discharge self-care.
Importantly, the study’s authors were explicit about what their work did not show. Clinical effectiveness was not evaluated in the present study, and they stated that further studies are required to determine the application’s effects on self-care behaviors and clinical outcomes. In other words, the reported findings establish that the tool was well designed and well received by its intended users, not that using it improves recovery, reduces complications, or changes health outcomes after surgery.
The study also has structural limitations worth keeping in view. The article was released as an early shared version, citable with a permanent DOI but subject to further edits before the final version of record replaces it. Nonetheless, the work offers a concrete, phased template for building patient-facing surgical education software: define educational needs from the literature, assemble and expert-validate content in multiple formats, build and have specialists approve the application, and then test usability with the actual target population using a standardized instrument.
As mobile health tools multiply, studies like this one highlight a useful distinction between usability and efficacy. A high QUIS score indicates that patients found the application easy to learn and satisfying to use, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for clinical benefit. The next step for this Iranian team’s application, by their own account, is testing whether a well-liked, expert-validated self-care app actually changes what patients do after they leave the hospital, and whether those changed behaviors translate into better outcomes after coronary artery bypass grafting.
Subject of Research: Design and usability evaluation of a smartphone-based self-care education application for patients after coronary artery bypass grafting surgery in Iran.
Article Title: Design and evaluation of a smartphone-based self-care application for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting
Article References: Yaghoubi, M. J., Abolhassani, S., Atashi, V., & Sattari, M. (2026). Design and evaluation of a smartphone-based self-care application for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-026-03911-5
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12911-026-03911-5
Keywords: coronary artery bypass grafting, smartphone application, self-care, mobile health, usability evaluation, patient education, cardiac surgery, digital health, QUIS questionnaire, Iran, post-discharge care, health informatics
News Source: Ophelia Keating. (October 29, 2026). Research report: Design and evaluation of a smartphone-based self-care application for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting. Scienmag.
