Evaluating the sustainability of a smart technology application to mobile health care: the FGM–ACO–FWA approach

Smart technologies present numerous opportunities for enhancing mobile health care. However, existing applications of smart technologies to mobile health care face several difficulties. As a result, whether a smart technology application to mobile health care will be sustainable is questionable. To address this issue, the fuzzy geometric mean (FGM)–α-cut operations (ACO)–fuzzy weighted average (FWA) approach is proposed in this study. In the proposed methodology, at first FGM is applied to aggregate multiple experts’ opinions on the relative importance of a critical factor. Then, ACO is applied to derive the absolute fuzzy importance level of the critical factor. At last, FWA is applied to assess the sustainability of the smart technology application to mobile health care. The proposed methodology has been applied to assess the sustainability of thirteen smart technology applications to mobile health care. According to the experimental results, the most and least sustainable smart technology applications to mobile health care were smart mobile service and smart clothes, respectively. In addition, the ranking result using the proposed methodology was somewhat different from those using existing methods based on approximation.