Mobile health apps are increasingly popular, but how well do they work to provide people with the tailored information they seek? A research group in the School of Public Health recently completed the first phase of a four-year project to design and field test a mobile health (mHealth) app that will provide personalized health information for African Americans and Spanish-speaking Hispanic users. A paper written by SPH professors Devlon Jackson, Neil Sehgal, and Cynthia Baur and published in JMIR Formative Research describes the benefits of community-based research in developing the app.
This phase of research consisted of engaging African American and Hispanic adults to get their input on the app’s design over the course of a year. The goal was to get a better understanding of how these communities would use the app, including cultural preferences and needs and health literacy issues specific to racial and ethnic groups.
A study from the Pew Research Center suggests African American and Hispanic adults are more likely to use smartphones to access health information than their white counterparts. At the same time, according to national data, African American and Hispanic individuals had lower average adequate health literacy and are more vulnerable to some of the most common and preventable causes of illness.
“It is also important to consider how language is associated with health literacy in relation to the Hispanic population that prefers to speak Spanish or has limited English proficiency for health-related concerns,” the paper reads. “As the Hispanic population has grown substantially over the past decade, it is imperative that apps are available in Spanish to address their health information needs.”
All of this suggests the need for a well-designed mHealth app focused on preventative approaches to health. The app needs to push culturally appropriate, credible and easy to understand information to its users.
The paper stressed the importance of community input and user-informed design in the development of the app. The authors offered four lessons from this phase of the project: community partnerships are key in building a chain of trust to ensure participants felt comfortable in the app research; community-based participatory research principles offer promising results in engaging these populations; interactive design sessions help reveal participants’ needs as they pertain to the app; and multiple design sessions with different methods help provide better understanding of the community needs.
“Future developers should consider more integrative app development approaches to ensure that the apps on the market contribute to eliminating health disparities and achieving health equity,” the paper concluded. “It is the responsibility of those who are developing mHealth apps to ensure that studies are inclusive of the communities they intend to serve.”