Page - 49 - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

Linking Activity Theory with User Centred Design: A Human Computer Interaction mHealth Interventions Alice GOODa,1 and Omobolanle OMISADEa a School of Computing, Faculty of Technology, University of Portsmouth, UK Abstract. mHealth can offer great potential for the self-management of health conditions and facilitating health services. It is therefore imperative that the design of mHealth systems afford optimum efficacy and effectiveness. Involving end users in collaborative decision making is an essential aspect of increasing acceptance of the treatment intervention. Involving users in the design and evaluation of mHealth systems helps to enable a better understanding of the complexity of user needs and how to incorporate this information effectively into the design process. This chapter discusses how Activity Theory can help to provide a theoretical lens for a User Centred Design framework in the design of mHealth systems. A general overview of Activity Theory and User Centred Design are provided, followed by their application in mHealth. Two use cases are provided that demonstrate how Activity Theory has helped provide a broader contextual analysis to a User Centred iterative approach to system design and evaluation. Keywords. User Centred Design, Activity Theory, Human Computer Interaction, mHealth Learning objectives After reading the chapter, the reader will be able to: 1. Understand the groundings of Human Computer Interaction, User Centred Design and Activity Theory. 2. Demonstrate how Activity Theory can be applied to a User Centred Design approach throughout the technology life cycle design. 3. Understand how to apply User Centred Design principles in the design, implementation and evaluation of mHealth applications. 4. Explain how Activity Theory can provide a contextual analysis of user needs in mHealth applications. 1 Corresponding Author: Alice Good; E-mail: alice.good@port.ac.uk Framework for the Design and Evaluation of Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics P. Scott et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI190110 49