Using Goal-Directed Design to Create a Mobile Health App to Improve Patient Compliance With Hypertension Self-Management: Development and Deployment

Background Hypertension is a lifestyle-induced chronic disease that threatens the lives of patients. Control of hypertension requires patients to follow self-management regimes; unfortunately, however, patient compliance with hypertension self-management is low, especially in developing countries. Improvement of patient compliance is premised on meeting patient needs. Mobile health apps are becoming increasingly popular for self-management of chronic diseases. However, few mobile apps have been designed to meet patient needs for hypertension self-management. Objective The goal of this study was to develop a mobile health app to improve patient compliance with hypertension self-management and evaluate the effectiveness of the app in terms of patient compliance. Methods The goal-directed design method was applied to guide study design. We divided the study into 4 stages. Stages 1 to 3 comprised the development process. To improve the applicability of the goal-directed design method to chronic disease management, we extracted elements of user models concerned with patient compliance and defined a concrete process for user modeling. In stage 1, personas of hypertensive patients were built using qualitative and quantitative methods. Clustering methods based on questionnaire responses were used to group patients. Qualitative interviews were conducted to identify the needs of different groups. In stage 2, several functional modules were designed to meet the needs of different groups based on the results from stage 1. In stage 3, prototypes of functional modules were designed and implemented as a real app. Stage 4 was the deployment process, in which we conducted a pilot study to investigate patient compliance after using the app. Patient compliance was calculated through the frequency with which they took blood pressure measurements. In addition, qualitative interviews were conducted to learn the underlying reasons for the compliance results. Results In stage 1, patients were divided into 3 groups based on 82 valid questionnaire responses. Eighteen patients from the different groups (7, 5, and 6 patients) were interviewed, and the needs of the groups were summarized as follows: improve self-management ability, enhance self-management motivation, and receive self-management support. In stages 2 and 3, 6 functional modules were designed and implemented based on specified needs, and the usability of the app was improved through usability tests. In stage 4, 143 patients were recruited to use different versions of the app for 2 months. Results show that patient compliance improved as functional modules were added (P<.001) and was maintained at a high level (rate of 0.73). Interview results from 32 patients show that the design of the app met different needs; thus, patients were more compliant with it. Conclusions This study developed a mobile health app for hypertension self-management using the goal-directed design method. The app proved to be effective for improving patient compliance with hypertension self-management.