Development of an mHealth Application for Women Newly Diagnosed with Osteoporosis without Preceding Fractures: A Participatory Design Approach

Abstract

mHealth is a useful tool to improve health outcome within chronic disease management. However, mHealth is not implemented in the field of postmenopausal osteoporosis even though it is a major worldwide health challenge. Therefore, this study aims to design and develop an mHealth app to support women in self-management of osteoporosis when they are diagnosed without preceding fractures. Participatory design is conducted in three phases. Based on identified needs in the first phase, a prototype is designed and developed in an iterative process in the second phase before the mHealth app is tested in the third phase. This paper focuses on the user activities in phase two and describes how a team of researchers, women, physicians, healthcare professionals, and app designers are involved in the participatory design process. The study shows that participatory design is a viable approach when developing an mHealth app for women with asymptomatic osteoporosis. Results obtained from the workshops and laboratory tests demonstrate the importance of feedback from users in the iterative process, as well as the participation of users and app designers in workshops and laboratory tests to enable mutual learning when developing new mHealth solutions. The regular member-checks and involvement of users helped to identify challenges associated with providing healthcare services through an app.

Need Assessment and Development of a Mobile-based Medication Dosage Calculation Application for ICU nurses

“…Technologies developed by participatory design projects are often more successful because users are involved in the process of identifying needs in design and development [30].…”

Help at hand: Women’s experiences of using a mobile health application upon diagnosis of asymptomatic osteoporosis

“…Since it was a strongly expressed need among the women to have immediate access to the result, in order to prepare for the GP visit, 1 we decided to develop an app that would provide the women with the result on the morning after the scan. 22 The plan was that the women could use the waiting time to prepare for the GP visit. Based on the findings, we will make it clearer in the app that a message will be sent to the patient from the hospital when the report is sent to the GP.…”

“…In the second phase, we designed and developed an mHealth app in an iterative process together with a team of users, healthcare professionals and app designers at a Danish university hospital. 22 A prototype of the app ‘My Osteoporosis Journey’ has been fully developed. In the third phase, the aim was to test the final prototype of the mHealth app in a clinical setting among women who did not participate in the design and development process.…”

Methodological Foundations of Mhealth Design Studies: A Content Analysis of Literature

“…Involvement of stakeholders during workshops and focus-groups are common methods used during the design, development of mHealth apps. Having interdisciplinary teams, which consists of professionals from technical, clinical and organizational backgrounds for the co-design efforts is the key feature of the participatory design research (Ravn et al, 2018;Revenäs et al, 2015). Lin et al, which also adopts participatory design, highlights the importance of adaptive intervention design (AID) approach to be able to update an intervention throughout a trial while assuring the delivery of the same intervention to every participant (Lin et al, 2015).…”