A Digital Health Intervention for Weight Management for Latino Families Living in Rural Communities: Perspectives and Lessons Learned During Development.

Rural residents face numerous challenges in accessing quality health care for management of chronic diseases (eg, obesity, diabetes), including scarcity of health care services and insufficient public transport. Digital health interventions, which include modalities such as internet, smartphones, and monitoring sensors, may help increase rural residents' access to health care. While digital health interventions have become an increasingly popular intervention strategy to address obesity, research examining the use of technological tools for obesity management among rural Latino populations is limited. In this paper, we share our experience developing a culturally tailored, interactive health intervention using digital technologies for a family-oriented, weight management program in a rural, primarily Latino community. We describe the formative research that guided the development of the intervention, discuss the process of developing the intervention technologies including issues of privacy and data security, examine the results of a pilot study, and share lessons learned. Our experience can help others design user-centered digital health interventions to engage underserved populations in the uptake of healthy lifestyle and disease management skills.

Facilitating the development of cross-platform mHealth applications for chronic supportive care and a case study.

Mobile health (mHealth) apps have received increasing attention, due to their abilities to support patients who suffer from various conditions. mHealth apps may be especially helpful for patients with chronic diseases, by providing pertinent information, tracking symptoms, and inspiring adherence to medication regimens. To achieve these objectives, researchers need to prototype mHealth apps with dedicated software architectures. In this paper, a cloud-based mHealth application development concept is presented for chronic patient supportive care apps. The concept integrates existing software platforms and services for simplified app development that can be reused for other target applications. This developmental method also facilitates app portability, through the use of common components found across multiple mobile platforms, and scalability, through the loose coupling of services. The results are demonstrated by the development of native Android and cross-platform web apps, in a case study that presents an mHealth solution for endocrine hormone therapy (EHT). A performance analysis methodology, an app usability evaluation, based on focus group responses, and alpha and pre-beta testing results are provided.

Technology-based health promotion: Current state and perspectives in emerging gig economy.

It has been a decade since smartphone application stores started allowing developers to post their own applications. This paper presents a narrative review on the state-of-the-art and the future of technology used by researchers in the field of mobile health promotion. Researchers build high cost, complex systems with the purpose of promoting health and collecting data. These systems promote health by using a feedback component that "educates" the subject. Other researchers instead use platforms which provide them with data collected by others, which allows for no communication with subjects, but may be cheaper than building a system to collect the data. This second type of systems cannot be used directly for health promotion. However, both types of systems are relevant to the field of health promotion, because they are precursors to a third type of systems that are emerging, the gig economy systems for mobile health data collection, which are low cost, globally available, and provide limited communication with subjects. If such systems evolve to include more channels for communication with the data-generating subjects, and also bring developers into the economy, they may eventually revolutionize the field of mobile health promotion and data collection by giving researchers new capabilities, such as the ability to replicate existing health promotion campaigns with the click of a button and the appropriate licenses. In this paper we present a review of state-of-the-art systems for mobile health promotion and data collection and a model for what these systems may look like in the future.

Anatomy of BioJS, an open source community for the life sciences.

BioJS is an open source software project that develops visualization tools for different types of biological data. Here we report on the factors that influenced the growth of the BioJS user and developer community, and outline our strategy for building on this growth. The lessons we have learned on BioJS may also be relevant to other open source software projects.