Designing socio-technical digital health interventions for and with low-resource communities

Ortega Roman, Deysi 2025. Designing socio-technical digital health interventions for and with low-resource communities. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The complementary feeding period is crucial for providing infants and young children with the necessary nutrients to achieve their optimal growth and physiological development. However, many children around the world remain malnourished. Different strategies have been applied to address this problem. However, many infrastructural barriers limit their implementation, especially in low-resource settings. Recently, digital health technologies open opportunities to support caregivers, healthcare professionals, and other community health workers in enhancing child care practices. However, most of these interventions have not considered the lived experience of people and have overlooked the situated context of use, resulting in solutions that fail to meet people’s needs, and a lack of adoption, especially in the Global South. This thesis explores the creation and adaptation of methods and tools to engage with low-resource communities in Peru to promote healthy nutrition among children from six to 23 months. It describes the iterative design of context-specific design cards and presents a co-design process involving several co-design workshops with caregivers, health promoters and healthcare professionals from two Peruvian communities. Data were iteratively analysed using affinity diagrams and thematic analysis. As result of the co-design process, an interactive mat was implemented and evaluated. This thesis contributes by a) describing the design process of the context-specific design cards, the features for designing contextual materials, and describing the different usages of the cards, b) highlighting the critical role of physical (e.g., venue and design cards), temporal, and social (e.g., encouragement) factors that influence caregivers’ and healthcare workers’ participation and facilitation practices in co-design, and c) exploring the design space of lowcost tangible user interfaces in low-resource communities through the design of an interactive mat and evaluating its acceptability and potential to promote nutrition in healthcare centres. Based on my findings, my work provides a series of design recommendations for digital health interventions for child health and the design of materials and tools to support co-design in low-resource communities.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 May 2026
Last Modified:	21 May 2026 13:20
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187150

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