| dc.description.abstract | Low back pain is a prevalent issue in the developed world as people adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. This thesis gives insight to available interactive health communication applications for self-managing non-specific low back pain, with the main focus on mobile delivered interventions. The aim of this thesis was to conceptualize and prototype a mobile user interface for the decision support system selfBACK which is providing an interactive self-management program for non-specific low back pain.
We conducted three workshops with a multidisciplinary group of people specialising in technology, medicine and user experience design. The outcome of this process was the initial sketches of the conceptual design. After this we conducted a review of existing solutions in found in literature and a review of commercial mobile apps. Finally, all the ideas from the workshops and existing solutions were brought together in a complete design proposal. In order to conduct experiments to validate the design, we implemented both a native Android and iOS prototype which is communicating with a restful backend server. The prototyped allowed us to conduct the user test with a survey of non-implemented functionality, a usability test of the implemented components and a post-test questionnaire. The participants were five eligible testers having suffered from back pain. The results and feedback from the user test were compared to previous research, and finally we present suggestions for improvements to design proposal. | |
