There has been a proliferation of research examining how mobile health (mHealth) applications can encourage wellness. A growing focus of this work has been exploring how mHealth tools can promote healthy behaviors within vulnerable populations. We conducted a systematic review of such research, examining the design and impact of mHealth tools for low-socioeconomic individuals and racial/ethnic minority groups. Our corpus consisted of 83 papers. Our analysis provides a corpus overview of the research methodology, mHealth system design and implementation, the populations involved in intervention design and evaluation, and promising mHealth intervention techniques. We discuss topics including the impact of the theoretical basis on interventions design, the implications of underreported and underrepresented study populations, and the barriers to and facilitators of mHealth interventions. Our findings highlight trends that can drive critically needed digital innovations in health promotion for populations that experience disproportionate barriers to wellness.
This work was supported by a grant funded by the Aetna Foundation.
People
- Andrea G. Parker, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
- Holly Jimison, Ph.D.
- Misha Pavel, Ph.D.
- Elizabeth Stowell, Personal Health Informatics Ph.D. Student
- Herman Saksono, Computer Science Ph.D. Student
- Mercedes C. Lyson, Ph.D.
- Reneé C. Wurth, Ph.D.
Publications
- Designing and Evaluating mHealth Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: A Systematic Review. Elizabeth Stowell, Mercedes C. Lyson, Herman Saksono, Reneé C. Wurth , Holly Jimison, Misha Pavel, Andrea G. Parker. 2018. Designing and Evaluating mHealth Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: A Systematic Review. To appear in Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA. (PDF)
- Stowell, E., Lyson, M., Wurth, R., Saksono, H., Jimison, H., Pavel, M., Parker, A.G. 2015. mHealth Research in Vulnerable Populations: A Systematic Review. Poster presented at the Harvard Forum on Population Health Equity, 2016.
- Stowell, E., Lyson, M., Wurth, R., Saksono, H., Jimison, H., Pavel, M., Parker, A.G. 2015. mHealth Research in Vulnerable Populations: A Systematic Review. Poster presented at the Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH), CHI 2016.