Innovation in Chronic Disease Care for Rural Ghana

The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana played a crucial role as an academic partner. They provided valuable expertise in public health research and contributed local knowledge on healthcare challenges in rural communities. This helped to ensure that the digital solutions were culturally and contextually appropriate.

As the UX researcher and Research Fellow, I led human centered research initiatives. This included facilitating focus groups with diabetic patients, conducting stakeholder interviews, and synthesizing these findings to guide the development of a mobile health solution. I worked closely with local healthcare workers and KNUST to ensure that our research aligned with the needs of the community.

In rural Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana, patients with diabetes face significant barriers to healthcare access due to geographic isolation and limited medical resources. The challenge was to explore how a simple digital solution, like SMS, could support these patients by providing health education and reminders, thereby improving their care.

We employed a human-centered research methodology, including:

Focus Groups with 20 diabetic patients to understand their healthcare challenges and mobile phone usage.

Stakeholder Interviews with healthcare workers (10), policymakers (5), and community leaders (5) to assess the feasibility of SMS-based healthcare communication.

Synthesizing findings to develop an early prototype of a diabetes care SMS service aimed at delivering timely health education and medication reminders.

The research demonstrated that SMS could be a highly effective, low-cost tool for supporting diabetic patients in rural Ghana. Early feedback from both patients and healthcare workers was positive, with reports that SMS reminders helped improve medication adherence and health monitoring. This approach showed great promise in addressing chronic disease management challenges in underserved areas.