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Patient empowerment through mobile health: Case study with a Brazilian application for pregnancy support
Author(s) -
Delgado Gustavo V.,
Carvalho Rodrigo B.,
Choo Chun W.,
Leite Ramon S.,
Castro José M.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.221
Subject(s) - empowerment , psychology , women's empowerment , data collection , health care , portuguese , mhealth , value (mathematics) , nursing , sociology , medicine , computer science , political science , social science , psychological intervention , linguistics , philosophy , law , machine learning
This paper analyzes how mobile health applications contribute to the empowerment of health service users. The theoretical foundation includes m‐health, user empowerment, and value co‐creation. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the Kangaroo application (Canguru, in Portuguese), which targets Brazilian pregnant women and seeks to make women empowered for a healthy pregnancy. The free app is a healthcare social network designed by a health‐tech startup and a reference Brazilian hospital. It has already supported 350,000 pregnant women, and more than 200 health professionals. The data collection effort comprised application log analysis of 6 months of records of 99,709 users, mobile‐based survey with 429 women and 16 interviews. The results showed that the functionalities of the personal and social dimensions mapped in the application explain 85.5% of the user empowerment. The app social features impacted 2.4 more than the personal functionalities. The quantitative analysis concluded that there was no moderating effect of styles of value co‐creation practices on the relationship between empowerment and its dimensions. The theoretical contribution is associated with the discussion of the influence of personal and social dimensions of m‐health to the user empowerment.