Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 9, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 2, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 8, 2020
Regulatory Sandboxes: A Cure for mHealth Pilotitis?
ABSTRACT
mHealth interventions have not scaled globally as anticipated despite large investments, including by governments and philanthropic foundations. The implementation of digital health tools has suffered from two limitations: a) the interventions commonly ignore the law of amplification that states that technology is most likely to succeed when it seeks to augment, and not alter human behavior; and b) end-user needs and clinical gaps are often poorly understood while designing solutions. In this article we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has addressed the first of the two problems – some of the technology solutions that have been struggling to find traction, are now closely aligned with health-seeking behavior. The second, that of poorly designed solutions, including the plethora of prediction tools and digital contact tracing apps, can be better vetted in a controlled real-world testing environment, by developing Regulatory Sandboxes, as the fintech industry has successfully done – before deploying solutions at scale.
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