JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

mHealth systems have been deployed widely in Lower- and Middle-Income countries (LMICs) for health system strengthening, requiring considerable resource allocation. However, most solutions have not achieved scale or sustainability. Poor usability is among the principal reasons mHealth systems fail to achieve acceptance and adoption by healthcare workers. A human-centered design approach to improve mHealth system use requires an exploration of users’ perceptions of mHealth systems including the environmental, user-related, and technological aspects of a system. At present, there is a dearth of tools available to investigators and designers to guide such an exploration. We developed the Vinyasa Tool to aid qualitative research of mHealth solutions in LMICs for human-centered design. The tool is a guide for focus group discussions and key informant interviews with community-based healthcare workers and primary care medical personnel. We collated findings and themes from qualitative studies among healthcare workers in LMICs and used the Informatics Stack framework to label, sort and collapse findings and themes into a list of questions. In our experience, the Vinyasa Tool facilitated a comprehensive and flexible enquiry with end users. It has potential to make a significant contribution towards human-centered design for digital health in low-resource settings. We describe here the development of the Vinyasa Tool and submit it for further use and adaptation.