Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jun 5, 2020
Date Accepted: Feb 15, 2021
A Tutorial on the Challenges and Solutions for Developing Tailored Video Interventions that Integrate Multiple Digital Assets to Promote Engagement and Improve Health Outcomes: The Positive Health Check Example
ABSTRACT
Background:
Video is a versatile and popular medium for digital health interventions and as the technology behind mobile devices and applications advances, video-based interventions may become increasingly common. Though a complex and busy environment, clinic waiting rooms offer the opportunity for implementing digital interventions to patients waiting to see their providers. However, to increase efficient ways of working in public health, to leverage the scalability and low cost of implementing digital interventions, and to keep up with rapidly advancing technology and user needs, more guidance is needed on the design and development of video-based tailored interventions.
Objective:
We provide a tutorial for digital intervention researchers and developers who wish to efficiently design and develop video-based, tailored, digital health interventions by describing our challenges and solutions encountered with Positive Health Check (PHC). PHC, a hybrid app, is a brief, interactive, individually-tailored video-based digital HIV behavioral counseling intervention. PHC uses video clips, and multimedia digital assets to deliver intervention content. These include interactive, tailored messages and graphics, a repurposed animated video and patient and provider handouts generated in real-time by PHC.
Methods:
The PHC Team chronicles several challenges and solutions for (1) using video as a medium to enhance user engagement; (2) navigating the complexity of linking a database of video clips with other digital assets; and, (3) identifying the main steps to building an app that will seamlessly deliver to users individually-tailored messages, graphics and handouts.
Results:
We leveraged video to enhance user engagement by featuring “video doctors”, full screen video, storyboards and streamlined scripts. We developed an approach to link the database of video clips with other digital assets through script coding and flow diagrams of algorithms for delivering a tailored user experience. Our PHC Team identified steps to app development including the use of keyframes to design integration of video and digital assets, the use of agile development methods to gather iterative feedback from multidisciplinary teams, and the creation of an intelligent data-driven backend solution that will tailor message delivery to individual users.
Conclusions:
Currently, due to the recent Covid-19 emergency, the use of digital formats in clinic settings is rapidly increasing due to the soaring number of patient-provider video chats through telemedicine. Yet, facilitating the adoption of an HIV video intervention in HIV clinic settings is still a work in progress. Our experience in designing and developing PHC presented unique challenges due to the extensive use of a large data base of videos individually tailored to each user. Although PHC focuses on promoting health and well-being among persons with HIV, the challenges and solutions presented here are transferable to video-based digital health interventions focused on other areas of health.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.