Chapters authored
Digital Health Interventions (DHIs) to Support the Management of Children and Adolescents with Sickle‐Cell Disease
Sickle‐cell disease (SCD) is a very complex disorder alluding to all areas of medicine. Nevertheless, basic preventive and therapeutic interventions in patients suffering from SCD are extremely simple. However, in everyday life it is sometimes virtually impossible to motivate children and young adolescents to effectively self‐manage their disorder at an early stage. Digital health interventions (DHIs) provide new opportunities to support self‐management behaviours. DHIs may facilitate daily and recurrent routines such as drug intake or appointments along with helping the patients to better cope with their disease. This may be realized through mobile‐training programmes, disease‐specific social networks using secure communication channels, diaries, blogs and even games. Indeed, there are fascinating opportunities for modern disease‐training programmes to take advantage of several media that can be combined and didactically optimized to meet the individual needs and intellectual abilities of different patients. The technological progress is rapid, extremely dynamic and highly creative. Our chapter gives an overview of the multifarious world of DHIs with a focus on smartphone applications known as mobile health apps (mHealth apps). We elucidate the potential reasons why we think that numerous apps for SCD patients have not been successful and which app features developers should consider if they want to create a popular patient app.
Part of the book: Sickle Cell Disease