Exploring Needs and Possibilities of mHealth Services for Persons with Chronic Disease

Sammanfattning: The amount of people living with chronic diseases is increasing. Chronic diseases do not only induce human suffering, it is also an economic burden on society. To ease the suffering and reduce the costs connected to chronic diseases, the usage of digital health services might be a possibility. Currently, the expectations on such services are high, but not met. To better meet the expectations, this project investigated the needs of digital health services for people with chronic disease and suggested new ways of meeting the identified needs. The project followed a user-centred design process, divided into four phases: (1) background information gathering, (2) user studies, (3) concept generation and (4) defining concepts. The first two phases provided insights regarding available digital health services and common needs of people living with chronic disease. The identified needs mostly regarded psychological challenges in accepting the disease, struggles in the communication with caregivers and authorities and difficulties in finding relevant and personalised services and treatments. Furthermore, a great willingness to use digital services to manage health and diseases was identified, along with safety concerns of such services. In the last two phases the identified needs were used for creating and detailing four different design concepts, representing four different digital health services. These included (1) a digital health account, (2) a health crowdsourcing platform, (3) a social AI health buddy and (4) a health gaming app. An assessment of the concepts showed that none of them managed to fully meet the identified needs, but by merging the concepts there are great possibilities in creating a comprehensive service.