Health in hand: Putting mHealth design in context

Wireless technologies, cloud computing and connectivity have enabled mobile services that extend the coverage of health services, resulting in a branch of eHealth now commonly referred to as mHealth. However, at least in Sweden, where the healthcare sector is heavily institutionalized and regulated, mHealth has so far mainly evolved in the form of applications for support of healthy life-style and self-management of chronic diseases, implemented outside of the firewalls of traditional healthcare delivery environments. In this paper we present an on-going Indo-Swedish research and development project in which we are putting mHealth design into context both from a patient's perspective and from the perspective of a healthcare team working within a professional healthcare organization. Our research approach is inspired by the Scandinavian tradition of Participatory Design of ICT and informed by studies of how to measure usability, user experience and impact of mHealth interventions. The involved research teams are multi-disciplinary, including researchers from engineering, computing and health sciences. The project includes, on the Swedish side, a partner from the public healthcare sector, three SME:s and an industrial partner who is currently providing Electronic Patient Record and other healthcare information system solutions and who is interested in developing mobile solutions for healthcare professionals. We are currently in the process of collaborative articulation and specification of problems, goals and requirements within the framework of the first Swedish case study of the project, focused on mobile support for patients with diabetes type 2 and their healthcare teams.