Rationale and development of the Vita Nova project:and app and service to reduce cardiovascularand metabolic risks in pre-menopausal andmenopausal women

Abstract

Background and purpose: Despite the recent increase in research and development of mobile self-care tools, there is still a marked lack of solutions focusing on prevention of the negative health effects of the menopause. Moreover, most of the solutions that do exist are not based on well-founded user models, such as personas, and fail to exploit the potential of persuasive mobile technology, and thus result in a user experience that is neither engaging nor adaptive.|
Methods: We describe how we designed personas during the development of a mobile application for menopause selfcare. We applied the principles of the Persuasive Systems Design model and the Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions framework, together with participatory techniques and demographic data analysis.|
Results: The Vita Nova App prototype has been successfully completed. The usability of this mobile app and service, designed to accompany and coach women regarding the menopause, automatically adapting to their wants and needs in order to induce positive health-related behavioural changes, is currently being verified through a pilot study in a “real-life” scenario of a small group of healthy peri-menopausal and early- and late- postmenopausal women. This preliminary investigation is now in its final stages.|
Conclusions: This approach allowed us to come up with reliable representations of our target users and their goals, which in turn enables us to better define and communicate our project’s scope and features. Moreover, this approach is not limited to the menopause domain. In the future, it could also be used, to reliably represent users, when designing mobile self-care solutions in other health-related domains or scenarios of female life. Further investigations in larger study populations of healthy peri- and post-menopausal women will be mandatory in order to assess the real impact of this app

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