Designing Disease-Specific mHealth Apps for Clinical Value

mHealth apps for patient use are promising but continue to face a plateau in usage. Current apps work for a limited segment of the patient population, i.e., those who enjoy tracking for intrinsic rewards. There are many opportunities to support patient care in between health care provider visits that are not currently being met for many diseases and patient types (personas). This is an area of great potential growth for mHealth apps and could contribute greatly to patient health and wellness. In this chapter, we propose a framework for how to think about the between-visit needs of patients that would motivate continued use of mhealth apps. We view the app design process from the following perspectives: 1) disease-specific needs, 2) non-disease specific needs, 3) behavioral theoretical aspects of app usage and 4) app-intrinsic usage motivators. Myasthenia gravis serves as the use case for illustrating these perspectives and how to use them in designing a disease-specific mHealth app.