JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Asbestos-containing materials (ACMs) can still be found in many homes in Australia and other countries. ACMs present a health risk when they are damaged or disturbed, such as during do-it-yourself home renovations. However, community members lack knowledge and awareness about asbestos identification and its safe management in residential settings.

Objective:

The objective of our study was to describe the process of developing a mobile phone app, ACM Check, that incorporates a questionnaire designed to identify and assess ACMs located in residential settings.

Methods:

A multidisciplinary team was involved in the formative development and creation of the mobile phone app. The formative development process comprised 6 steps: defining the scope of the app; conducting a comprehensive desktop review by searching online literature databases, as well as a wider online search for gray literature; drafting and revising the content, questionnaire, conditional branching rules, and scoring algorithms; obtaining expert input; manually pretesting the questionnaire; and formulating a final content document to be provided to the software development company. We then constructed ACM Check on the iOS platform for use in a validation study, and then updated the app, replicated it on Android, and released it to the public.

Results:

The ACM Check app identifies potential ACMs, prioritizes the materials based on their condition and likelihood of disturbance, and generates a summary report for each house assessed.

Conclusions:

ACM Check is an initiative to raise community members’ awareness of asbestos in the residential environment and also serves as a data collection tool for epidemiologic research. It can potentially be modified for implementation in other countries or used as the basis for the assessment of other occupational or environmental hazards.