Designing mhealth applications for developing countries

Abstract

The effective use of mobile IS offers great opportunities for improving health systems in developing countries and enhancing their quality of life. A case in point and, hence, an interesting research subject is Papua New Guinea for being a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Despite the opportunities, many mHealth solutions remain prototypical due to their design and lack of empirical evidence and just little literature discussing success factors exists. To overcome this problem, we derived Design Requirements for the implementation of an mHealth app. We followed a Design Science Research (DSR) approach (a) embedding a triangulation of a literature study, a user survey and on-site observations, (b) working in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary team and (c) evaluating the Design Requirements ex-ante by taking the example of an mHealth app to support midwives in Papua New Guinea. Practitioners, IS researcher, even design- or behaviourism-oriented, as well as transdis-ciplinary researchers can use the Design Requirement Framework for, on the one hand, design and implement applications in developing countries and, on the other hand, to take single already justified Design Requirements as starting point for a detailed investigation.