Assessing the Efficacy of Digital Health Technology in Low-Resource Settings

In recent years there have been increasing calls from fields such as medicine to expand the use of digital technologies in providing healthcare in low-resource settings. Particularly in rural areas, people may not be able to easily visit a healthcare provider in person, but they often have access to devices such as mobile phones. This project examines efforts to develop digital health services in a low-resourced and predominantly rural setting. The research contributes to the improvement of digital health services, offers training for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and undergraduate students, and enhances the infrastructure for research and education. This study addresses the following interrelated questions: (1) How do digital health technologies create new treatment experiences? (2) How do they affect communication strategies and relationships between patients and providers and (3) Are they considered an effective means of delivering treatment by providers and patients? Methods include the use of in-depth interviews and behavioral observations across a stratified sample of healthcare providers in three organizations, with patients and their family members. This project allows a rare opportunity to explore experiential dimensions of communication and human-technology interfaces. The long-term contribution to the science of medicine is an understanding of how new health technologies remake treatment strategies and patient-provider relationships, and how these processes affect whether therapies are considered effective. An emphasis on provider and patient interactions also moves forward investigation of robustness as a theoretical concern in the health sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.