JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

People living with chronic illnesses is an increasingly large group. Research indicates that care and self-management should not only focus on the illness and problem-oriented aspects of these people's lives, and also points to supporting these people to recognize and use more of their own personal strengths in their daily life can be of great value.

Objective:

This paper presents the design and developmental process of MyStrengths, a mHealth app designed to help its users (people with chronic conditions) both find and make use of, their own personal strengths in their daily life. Through 4 consecutive phases, this paper presents participant and researcher-driven activities, discussions regarding design, and development of both the Mystrengths app and its content

Methods:

During the 4 phases, we used a range of methods and activities, such as (1) An idea-generating workshop aiming to create ideas for strengths-supporting features with a range of different stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, relatives, and designers (N=35). (2) Research seminars with an international group of experts (N=6), in which, the concept, theoretical background, and design ideas for the app were discussed. (3) A series of co-design workshops with people in the user group (N=22) aiming to create ideas for how to, in an engaging manner, design the app. (4) in 4 developmental iterations, the app was evaluated by people in the user group (N=13). Content and strengths-exercises were worked on, and honed, by both the research team, the expert groups, and our internal editorial team during the entire developmental process.

Results:

The first phase found a wide range of stakeholder requirements to, and ideas for, strengths-focused mHealth apps. From reviewing literature during the second phase, we found a dearth of research on personal strengths with respect to people living with chronic illnesses. Activities during the third phase creatively provided numerous ideas and suggestions for engaging and gameful ways to develop and design the Mystrengths app. The final phase saw the output from all the earlier phases come together, and through multiple increasingly complete iterations of user evaluations testing and developing, the final prototype of the Mystrenghts app was created.

Conclusions:

Even though research supports the use of strengths-focused mHealth tools to support people living with chronic illnesses, there exists little guidance as to how these tools and their content should be designed. This paper illustrates how combining a range of user, researcher, literature, and designer-based methods can contribute to creating mHealth tools to support people with chronic illnesses to find, and use, more of their own personal strengths.