Culture in the design of mHealth UI:An effort to increase acceptance among culturally specific groups

Purpose: Designers of mobile applications have long understood the importance of users’ preferences in making the user experience easier, convenient and therefore valuable. The cultural aspects of groups of users are among the key features of users’ design preferences, because each group’s preferences depend on various features that are culturally compatible. The process of integrating culture into the design of a system has always been an important ingredient for effective and interactive human computer interface. This study aims to investigate the design of a mobile health (mHealth) application user interface (UI) based on Arabic culture. It was argued that integrating certain cultural values of specific groups of users into the design of UI would increase their acceptance of the technology. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 135 users responded to an online survey about their acceptance of a culturally designed mHealth. Findings: The findings showed that culturally based language, colours, layout and images had a significant relationship with users’ behavioural intention to use the culturally based mHealth UI. Research limitations/implications: First, the sample and the data collected of this study were restricted to Arab users and Arab culture; therefore, the results cannot be generalized to other cultures and users. Second, the adapted unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model was used in this study instead of the new version, which may expose new perceptions. Third, the cultural aspects of UI design in this study were limited to the images, colours, language and layout. Practical implications: It encourages UI designers to implement the relevant cultural aspects while developing mobile applications. Originality/value: Embedding Arab cultural aspects in designing UI for mobile applications to satisfy Arab users and enhance their acceptance toward using mobile applications, which will reflect positively on their lives.</p

The development of telemedicine programs in Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress and associated challenges

Monitoring the progress of telemedicine use in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries has received a considerable attention from many health organizations and governmental agencies. This study reviewed the current progress and challenges in relation to the development of telemedicine programs in SSA. The results from reviewing 66 empirical studies revealed an unbalanced progress across SSA countries. Further, technological, organisational, legal and regulatory, individual, financial, and cultural aspects were identified as the major barriers to the success of telemedicine development in SSA. This study reported the current trends in telemedicine application, as well as highlighting critical barriers for consideration by healthcare decision makers. The outcomes from this study offer a number of recommendations to support wider implementation and sustainable usage of telemedicine in SSA

Older adults’ satisfaction with mHealth UI design-based culture: A case study of Jordan

The dramatic growth of the older population worldwide has resulted in a renewed need for mobile health applications (mHealth apps). The use of mHealth UI-designed-based culture can be useful in improving the quality of healthcare for elderly users. Therefore, there is a need for a comprehensive examination of the impact of mHealth UI design-based culture on older adult people’s satisfaction. This study was conducted to promote older adults’ satisfaction with mHealth UI design-based culture in a culturally specific context. We examined the influence of learning, screen, application capabilities, and terminology and application information on older adults’ overall satisfaction with mHealth UI. Eighty-five older adults’ users from general population in Jordan participated in this study. The results showed different correlation coefficients between these factors. This study paves the way for future research to consider culture in the design of mHealth UI

Road Safety and Energy Saving Proposed System: A Zigbee WSN Approach

The problem of long bended routes in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is one of the annoying problems that harvest a big number of vitalities annually. The problem relays under the fact that these long bended route are in shortage for lighting because of its extremely high cost. Therefore, in this paper, a system will be proposed as a smart alerting system based on ZigBee sensor network. The proposed system targets the roads with weak lights at night time in order to reduce the number of accidents which may occur on such dangerous roads. A number of real experiments were conducted using ZigBee sensor nodes in order to test the efficiency and reliability of the proposed system. Through real experiments, it was demonstrated that the proposed system offers reasonable response time, and achieves low power consumption