Healthcare App Design in Low-Resource Contexts: Challenges, Practices, and Opportunities
This work tackles the challenge of improving healthcare access and delivery for underserved populations through digital technologies, but it is incremental as it focuses on discussion and collaboration rather than presenting new solutions.
The paper addresses the problem of designing healthcare applications for low-resource contexts, where assumptions about stable infrastructure and high digital literacy often fail, and highlights the need to consider infrastructural constraints, cultural contexts, and usability challenges.
Digital health technologies are increasingly used to improve healthcare access and delivery worldwide. However, many healthcare applications are designed for environments with stable infrastructure, high digital literacy, and strong institutional support. These assumptions often do not hold in low-resource contexts where healthcare delivery often depends on community health workers, caregivers, and informal care networks. Designing effective healthcare applications for such environments requires attention to infrastructural constraints, cultural contexts, language diversity, and usability challenges. This Birds of a Feather session aims to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in healthcare application design in low-resource contexts. The session will provide an informal forum for discussing challenges encountered in the design and deployment of digital health technologies in underserved settings, sharing field experiences, and identifying opportunities for collaboration within the Interactive Health (IH) community.