Applying our findings for health
As well as contributing to education, the ASSA project was committed to developing projects to more directly support health and wellbeing. This was based on the previous discoveries that suggested we can learn from the way people creatively use their smartphones for health, as opposed to traditional top-down mHealth approaches.
Examples of these include Charlotte Hawkins, who has worked with Ugandan doctors to secure funding for a telepsychiatry project in Kampala.
Alfonso Otaegui is developing a project to support ‘navigator nurses’ – the nurses that liaise between doctors and patients, in an oncology clinic in Santiago. He is also working to facilitate teaching smartphone use to older people in Chile.
Laura Haapio-Kirk has been piloting a LINE group to discuss food and diet for older people, while Marília Duque has worked on a WhatsApp-based diet monitoring protocol.
Other interventions that are ongoing, but were disrupted by Covid-19, include the development of social prescribing websites in the Ireland fieldsites. These will promote activities for the retired people in the area. In al-Quds (east Jerusalem), there are several initiatives assisting the local Palestinian population in accessing health sites.
