JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Solid organ transplant is the treatment of choice for children with end-stage organ failure. Ongoing recovery and medical management at home after transplant is important for recovery and transition to daily life. Smartphones are widely used and hold the potential for aiding in the establishment of mHealth protocols. Health care providers, nurses, and computer scientists collaboratively designed and developed myFAMI, a smartphone-based intervention application to promote a family self-management intervention for pediatric transplant families.

Objective:

In this paper we present outcomes of the design stages and development actions of the myFAMI application framework, along with key challenges, limitations, and strengths.

Methods:

The myFAMI application framework is built upon a theory-based intervention for pediatric transplant patients, with aid from action research methodology. Based on initially defined design motivation, the team of researchers collaboratively explored four research stages (research discussions, feedback, & motivations, alpha testing, and deployment) and developed features required for successful inauguration of the application in the real-world setting.

Results:

Deriving from application users and their functionalities, the myFAMI application framework is built with two primary components: the web app (for nurses and super-admin usage) and the smartphone applications (for participant/family member usage). The web app stores survey responses and triggers alerts to nurses when required based on the family members’ response. The smartphone applications present the notifications sent from the server to the participants and captures survey responses. Both the web app and the smartphone applications were built upon industry-standard software development frameworks and demonstrate great performance while deployed and used by study participants.

Conclusions:

In this paper we summarize a successful and efficient mHealth application building process using a theory-based intervention in nursing and action research methodology in computer science. Efficiency catalysts enabled easy navigation of the application and collection of data. This work lays the foundation for researchers to carefully integrate necessary information (from literature or experienced clinicians) to provide a robust and efficient solution, and evaluate the acceptability, utility, and usability for similar studies in the future. Clinical Trial: mHealth Family Self-Management (myFAMI), Clinical Trial ID NCT03533049, URL https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03533049