Developing a Resource for Supporting Community-Based Health Research: Towards Considerations for Advancing Equity in Mobile Health Technology

Community-based research is essential for understanding and incorporating perspectives, values, and needs of marginalized and underrepresented communities toward creating technology that provides more equitable and accessible healthcare. However, due to differences in research and design practices across disciplines, cross-domain dissemination and translation of research insights becomes challenging. Informed by our experience with and findings of our community-based health research, we created a resource for supporting researchers and designers in questioning their assumptions about community needs and practices to develop a more community-informed lens for creating health technologies. We interviewed 18 health researchers from different domains and revised the resource based on their feedback to make it more concise, usable, and workable. As we continue to refine the resource and considerations to be more actionable and useful, we reflect on challenges of translational research and our efforts to disseminate research insights to the broader community of health technology researchers and designers.