Resources for mHealth Community Outreach
ITHS has spearheaded the mHealth Project to better understand how people in Washington’s Latinx community feel about mobile health technology. Using the data they collected, the project team has created resources to help future researchers meet community needs when working in the field of mobile health.
Mobile health, or mHealth, means patient-facing mobile devices (such as wearable devices and self-monitors) used for a health-related purpose. mHealth has the potential to reduce barriers to healthcare access and improve health equity, but to do so effectively, it must be developed in alignment with community values and experiences. This mHealth project was developed by the ITHS Bioethics, Community Engagement and Biomedical Informatics teams to understand opinions about using technology to monitor health among Hispanics/Latinos around Washington State.
The mHealth project team recruited Hispanic/Latino people in central and western Washington for focus groups to discuss the utility and burden of using technology to monitor health, benefits and barriers of using mHealth technology, and recommendations on how such technology could be improved. The data from the focus groups was used to create a resource to help those are building new mHealth tools approach their work in an effective and equitable way. The project team also developed flyers to share their findings with the participants of the focus groups. These resources are all downloadable below. A paper on the project is also being developed.
