How African American and Hispanic Adults Perceive the Benefits of mHealth Co-design: Multi-method Formative Research for a Health Information App (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Participatory research methods are used in several disciplines, including mHealth, and have been shown to mitigate many adverse effects when the intended beneficiaries or users are not involved in the development and testing process. These methodologies provide insights into the challenges that health disparity populations such as African Americans and Hispanics may have with mHealth app use, cultural preferences and/or needs, and health literacy, specifically when seeking health information to manage their health. This paper describes a one-year multi-method participatory research process that directly engaged English-speaking African American and bilingual/Spanish-speaking Hispanic adults in developing a prevention-focused personalized mHealth information seeking smartphone application. This paper describes 1) the participatory approach, 2) the design session process, 3) participant reported experiences of the design sessions, and 4) recommendations (or lessons learned) for future research in mHealth app design for health disparity populations.