VEA - Personalizing the journey towards enhanced asthma self-management

Abstract

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases worldwide, and it is expected that the prevalence of asthma will only increase in the coming years (Masoli et al., 2004). Medical self-management by asthma patients will be of essential importance to keep the burden of disease as low as possible.

Medical self-management is critical in obtaining asthma control. Research suggests that the majority of patients can obtain asthma control, yet most adults are still living with uncontrolled asthma. Both extensive literature research and qualitative research with asthma patients and healthcare providers were executed to uncover what the barriers are that asthma patients face in medical asthma self-management.

The research uncovered three main problems that form barriers to efficient self-management.: beliefs, low motivation, and inability. Each of these problems has its underlying causes. Beliefs are caused by (1) paternalistic care, (2) lack of stimulation, (3) shortcomings in knowledge sources. Low motivation is the result of (1) paternalistic care, (2) lack of awareness, (3) discouragement due to inadequate tools. At last, inability is caused by (1) lack of knowledge, (2) lack of skills (3) lack of insight.

Several opportunity areas to enhance the self-management of asthma patients were discovered: (a) patient education, (b) self-tailoring, and (c) increasing competence.

Patient education can be enhanced by creating awareness and providing a better knowledge source through (1) personalization, (2) spreading knowledge. Enabling the patient to self-tailor can induce more active participation of the patient. Increasing the asthma patient’s competence can be done by (1) increasing self-knowledge (2) enabling action.

To overcome the barriers to self-management a design was proposed: vea. Vea consists of an app and a physical product.

The app enables the user to set goals and supports the user to achieve these goals. Through working on the goals, the app learns about the user and gets personalized. The physical device supports the app by measuring the air quality in the home of the user and gives feedback on this.

Key user benefits of the design are:

Personalization
Vea is designed to match the patients’ needs. Through personalizing its approach and content, the app becomes relevant to the user.

Being in control
The user is in charge of the goals they want to achieve. The app assists them by making the once invisible complaints and effects of self-management explicit.

Increased capability
Vea provides structured tools that increase the capability of the user to self-manage their asthma. Through seamlessly collecting data and providing relevant feedback and tips, the user is motivated and capable of acting.

User evaluation demonstrated that the proposed design is undoubtedly promising. Both asthma patients and general practitioners indicated that the design could lead to increased insight, motivation, and enhanced competence of medical self-management.

The main limitation of this master thesis is, however, determining the long-term effect of the design. Although the design has shown to be promising, unfortunately, no statement can be made of the long-term effect of vea on the actual improvement of medical self-management. To be able to do so, the design should be further developed and tested in the long term.