Mobile Health for HIV/AIDS Care

This is the final project for my graduate level course, HS528: Global Health Research for Vulnerable Populations. During the semester-long course, we learned about a variety of vulnerable populations, including LGBT populations, youth, and women, and the ethical measures that researchers need to take when studying these groups. We progressively built a research proposal throughout the course which culminated in a final research proposal and class presentation.

My proposal originated from an interest in the rise of mobile health (mHealth) technologies in global health. From there, I chose to select people living with HIV/AIDS as the target population for my research proposal because of my desire to learn more about the disease itself and how care is delivered to these individuals. After doing additional research into HIV/AIDS, I decided to focus on three locations in Western Kenya, a region with a high rate of HIV/AIDS. Because community health workers (CHWs) are currently serving these communities, I chose to include them in my study to limit the impact that a research study would have on the current status and methods of care delivery. My proposed methodology is a cluster randomized trial, in which the study population has been stratified by geographic region. The intervention that I proposed is a mobile application for CHWs that contains basic information about HIV/AIDS care, like educational videos and guiding images. While the majority of mHealth in the global health space has been developed with patients as end users, little work has been done to determine its effect on healthcare when providers are the end users. This project looks to explore this impact.