Touch screen technology for health behaviour change

weblog 4.4

Travers et al (2007) describe the use of touch screen kiosks (with audio feedback) delivering health promotion information to Aboriginal communities. Two modules were developed, one on alcohol use Grog Story and one on sexual health Put it On.

Clarification of the health messages was identified with experts in the field. Community elders were then involved to provide an understanding of social and cultural constraints including language use, explicitness etc. They then worked with youth representatives in the local communities to contextualise the messages. The community and youth representatives were involved in the workshops that developed the narratives. Finally the filming used Indigenous actors to ‘mentor’ local Indigenous people recruited locally. There was a formal community launch of the kiosk.

Evaluation of the  project identified positive impacts on self esteem for individuals who had been ‘engaged in creating their own representations’. There was high level of community engagement in development and then use of the kiosk content. It was not possible however, to identify quantitative evidence of changes to health outcomes (health literacy or behaviour change).

They concluded that this technology was ideal for addressing the ‘triple divide’’ of inequality in health, education and digital engagement.

Travers H, Hunter E, Gibson J, Campion J. (2007) Pride and performance: Innovative multimedia in the service of behavioural health change in remote Indigenous settings.  Proc 13th Intl Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. VSMM 2007, Brisbane, Australia