Identifying consumer's needs of health information technology through an innovative participatory design approach among English- and Spanish-speaking urban older adults.

OBJECTIVES: We describe an innovative community-centered participatory design approach, Consumer-centered Participatory Design (C2PD), and the results of applying C2PD to design and develop a web-based fall prevention system. METHODS: We conducted focus groups and design sessions with English- and Spanish-speaking community-dwelling older adults. Focus group data were summarized and used to inform the context of the design sessions. Descriptive content analysis methods were used to develop categorical descriptions of design session informant's needs related to information technology. RESULTS: The C2PD approach enabled the assessment and identification of informant's needs of health information technology (HIT) that informed the development of a falls prevention system. We learned that our informants needed a system that provides variation in functions/content; differentiates between actionable/non-actionable information/structures; and contains sensory cues that support wide-ranging and complex tasks in a varied, simple, and clear interface to facilitate self-management. CONCLUSIONS: The C2PD approach provides community-based organizations, academic researchers, and commercial entities with a systematic theoretically informed approach to develop HIT innovations. Our community-centered participatory design approach focuses on consumer's technology needs while taking into account core public health functions.

A comparison of usability factors of four mobile devices for accessing healthcare information by adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Mobile health (mHealth) is a growing field aimed at developing mobile information and communication technologies for healthcare. Adolescents are known for their ubiquitous use of mobile technologies in everyday life. However, the use of mHealth tools among adolescents is not well described. OBJECTIVE: We examined the usability of four commonly used mobile devices (an iPhone, an Android with touchscreen keyboard, an Android with built-in keyboard, and an iPad) for accessing healthcare information among a group of urban-dwelling adolescents. METHODS: Guided by the FITT (Fit between Individuals, Task, and Technology) framework, a thinkaloud protocol was combined with a questionnaire to describe usability on three dimensions: 1) task-technology fit; 2) individual-technology fit; and 3) individual-task fit. RESULTS: For task-technology fit, we compared the efficiency, and effectiveness of each of the devices tested and found that the iPhone was the most usable had the fewest errors and prompts and had the lowest mean overall task time For individual-task fit, we compared efficiency and learnability measures by website tasks and found no statistically significant effect on tasks steps, task time and number of errors. Following our comparison of success rates by website tasks, we compared the difference between two mobile applications which were used for diet tracking and found statistically significant effect on tasks steps, task time and number of errors. For individual-technology fit, interface quality was significantly different across devices indicating that this is an important factor to be considered in developing future mobile devices. CONCLUSIONS: All of our users were able to complete all of the tasks, however the time needed to complete the tasks was significantly different by mobile device and mHealth application. Future design of mobile technology and mHealth applications should place particular importance on interface quality.