Healthier Together helps people tap into support from friends, family, and anonymous app users to make daily lifestyle changes that lower their cancer risk over time.
Building healthy habits can have a big impact on your wellbeing, but sustaining them is challenging. As part of a five-year study by Penn Medicine's Center for Health Equity Advancement ↗, this project explored whether an app could help people leverage their social supports to maintain behavior changes that reduce cancer risk.
Client:
Discovery
First, we conducted open-ended interviews and tested paper mockups with people at higher-than-average risk for cancer. We investigated key questions: Are people more motivated by collaboration or competition? Do they prefer support from close friends or anonymous strangers? What health information are they comfortable sharing? Which goals resonate the most?
When we identified promising avenues of discovery, we tested an interactive prototype to validate that we were on the right track.
Results
We designed and built the app, then launched the pilot study to measure its impact. The study found that the implementation of a cancer-prevent app in a primary care setting was feasible and that the app achieved high usability and engagement among participants.
While I was originally brought on to design the UI and lead user testing, I ended up contributing significant data analysis and was included as a co-author on the resulting papers published in JMIR Formative Research (doi 10.2196/22510 ↗ and 10.2196/28157 ↗).
