Subramaniam Arvind, Hensley Elizabeth, Stojancic Rebecca, Vaughn Jacqueline, Shah Nirmish
Department of Adult Hematology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Duke Comprehensive Sickle Cell Care Unit, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA.
Mhealth. 2022 Jul 20;8:24. doi: 10.21037/mhealth-21-51. eCollection 2022.
Mobile health (mHealth) applications (app) have proven to be useful in gathering symptom data for a variety of populations living with chronic and serious illnesses. These mHealth tools have been built for a variety of populations but can quickly lose their novelty over time due to the lack of changes and engagement between the mHealth tool and the user. High costs, constantly changing timelines, and difficulties in building compliant data storage systems are some of the reasons why mHealth development and implementation can be a challenge.
Our team's tool, QuestExplore (QE), was built in collaboration with healthcare providers, child-life specialists, a music therapist, mobile app developers, data specialists, cyber security specialists, researchers, and children living with chronic illnesses alongside their families. Through this process, our team learned various ways to reduce costs, streamline the app development process, and build compliant data storage systems. In addition, our frequent interactions with stakeholders provided us with the ability to continuously make improvements, to build an engaging mHealth app.
Based upon our findings, our team needed to include prompting, condensing, gamification, data visualizations, and an engaging user design in the remodel of QE. Through a three-stage process of redesigning our previous symptom monitoring apps, QE was developed to better communicate between our users and their providers, with the overall hope of improving symptom management of these children.
In the paper, we aim to explain how our team developed QE with feedback from our stakeholders, while also continuously improving our development process through the lessons we gained through the app's development. QE is now being used in both Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will soon be implemented in Amsterdam University Medical Center.
移动健康（mHealth）应用程序已被证明在为各种慢性病和重症患者群体收集症状数据方面很有用。这些移动健康工具是为各种人群构建的，但由于移动健康工具与用户之间缺乏变化和互动，随着时间的推移，它们可能很快就会失去新鲜感。高成本、不断变化的时间表以及构建合规数据存储系统的困难是移动健康发展和实施面临挑战的一些原因。
我们团队的工具QuestExplore（QE）是与医疗保健提供者、儿童生活专家、音乐治疗师、移动应用程序开发者、数据专家、网络安全专家、研究人员以及患有慢性病的儿童及其家人合作构建的。通过这个过程，我们的团队学到了各种降低成本、简化应用程序开发过程以及构建合规数据存储系统的方法。此外，我们与利益相关者的频繁互动使我们有能力不断改进，构建一个引人入胜的移动健康应用程序。
根据我们的发现，我们的团队在重新设计QE时需要纳入提示、精简、游戏化、数据可视化以及引人入胜的用户设计。通过对我们之前的症状监测应用程序进行三阶段重新设计的过程，开发了QE，以便在我们的用户及其提供者之间更好地沟通，总体希望是改善这些儿童的症状管理。
在本文中，我们旨在解释我们的团队如何在利益相关者的反馈下开发QE，同时通过我们在应用程序开发过程中获得的经验教训不断改进我们的开发过程。QE目前正在杜克大学和北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校使用，不久将在阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心实施。
