A Consumer Health App Works Well. . . But, Diffusion Is Not So Easy

Abstract

AbstractThe number of mobile health apps is exploding, though few of these tools have been evaluated for effectiveness. Furthermore, even apps certified for their impact may not diffuse widely. App outreach efforts may lack “human touches,” when encouraging potential users to adopt. We (SHE and PC) built a nutrition app for low-income clients of community food pantries and confirmed its effectiveness in a randomized field trial. We then collaborated with a variety of community organizations in six diffusion efforts, inviting our sites to design interventions that incorporated human touches that they could sustain beyond our collaborations. We independently monitored the experiments’ impact. Collaborators’ diffusion efforts that deployed several human touches were judged more successful than trials that executed few. But, only half of our collaborating organizations embraced the most essential human touches, practices we judged were part of a User-Friendly Approach. A fundamental irony can stymie projects that create information technologies to help empower people, such as eating more healthily. The modern technology’s ultimate success may rest on ancient skills of nurturing users at the moment of downloading. In a high-tech world, it is the human touch that will make the difference between widespread adoption or not.