Mobile Health (mHealth) Tools to Improve Patient Engagement, Research and Disease Management of Children with Rheumatological Disease

PI’s: Jiten Chhabra & Prabhu Shankar

We designed and developed a homunculus based mHealth application for iOS to manage chronic arthritis in children from 7 to 18 years. To facilitate patient engagement and sustain patient participation, we incorporated highly interactive game mechanics and reward systems. To iteratively improve the application, the design and development team, along with clinical informaticians and engineering psychologists, developed a set of structured questionnaires to interview the stakeholders. The skeleton based homunculus was found scary by a few, but, the surrogate for skeleton-based homunculus, the robot design prototype, was well accepted and liked by both providers and patients. All patients gave a positive review of the idea of gaming enhanced by a reward system and opined that would improve their participation, though the suggestions for design improvements for continued patient engagement varied between younger and older children.

 

 

 


 



Publications

Prabhu Shankar, MD, MS, Jiten Chhabra, MD, MS, Rob Solomon, MS, Sampath Prahalad, MD, MSc, Pediatric Healthcare Innovation: Advancing Technologies to Improve Child Health Conference, Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center April 22, 2014.