Project Motivation: Given UMD's unique opportunity to serve the needs of rural Minnesota, we propose this project to explore the potential of developing technology--centered health interventions to promote engagement in healthy living in rural areas. Specifically, we want to improve rural access to innovative technology solutions, encourage shared accountability for population health, promote community-level quality measurements that track progress towards the goals for population health, and foster health equity.
Project Goal: we want to improve rural access to innovative technology solutions by presenting to rural Minnesotans a proof-of-concept app design that tracks progress towards individuals' goals for health and encourages shared accountability, support, and awareness of healthy practices.
Lead Student: Olivia Brazier
Based on the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, we want to unpack the practices and challenges of rural Minnesotans related to healthy living. For this project's initial step, we plan to conduct a three-phase study, where phases will be performed sequentially:
We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with rural Minnesotans to learn about individuals' current practices, challenges, and needs on health and technology;
We presented our app design and applied a user evaluation study to uncover how our target audience perceives the application design while interacting with it;
We want to refine the app based on the user feedback and plan a pilot study to validate whether the new design fits our target audience's needs.
Paper publication: OurHealth: a social technology concept to promote healthy behaviors in northwestern Minnesota https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3565967.3570982