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Abstract
Drawing on 5 years of experience designing, producing, and disseminating video health education programs globally, we outline the process of creating accessible, engaging, and relevant video health education content using a community-based, human-centered design approach. We show that this approach can yield a new generation of interventions, which are better aligned with the needs and contexts of target communities. The participation of target communities and local stakeholders in the content production and design process fosters ownership of the content and increases the likelihood that the resulting intervention will resonate within its intended primary audience and be disseminated broadly. Ease of future adaptation for additional global audiences and modification of the content for multiple dissemination pathways are important early considerations to ensure scalability and long-term impact of the intervention. Recent advances in mobile technology can facilitate the dissemination of accessible, engaging health education at scale, thereby enhancing the potential impact of video-based educational tools.Accessible and engaging health education is a cornerstone of health behavior change. Especially in low- and middle-income countries, increasing access to effective health education can contribute to improved health outcomes. Prior research has identified several characteristics of effective health education interventions. These include the integration of pictures, narratives, and entertainment-education, in which the health messages that make up the educational content are embedded. However, the effectiveness and long-term impact of health messages ultimately depend on how well the end users can identify with the content that is presented. This identification, in turn, is a function of how well the messages correspond to user needs and wants and how this correspondence is communicated through the design characteristics of the health education intervention.
Highlights
Background on Health Education StrategiesHealth behavior change, which can be motivated by effective health education, has been called “our greatest hope for reducing the burden of preventable disease and death around the world” [1]
Various theoretical models have been used to characterize the mechanisms by which narrative communication may lead to health behavior change, including the extended Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) [9]
Live footage of interviews with community members and local celebrity mothers used to enhance engagement in the 100% Breastfed Health Education series; changing voiceovers allowed for in-country adaptation for different learner populations but adapting the course for other African countries would require significant resources as on-camera interviews would need to be rerecorded for each new country
Summary
Health behavior change, which can be motivated by effective health education, has been called “our greatest hope for reducing the burden of preventable disease and death around the world” [1]. Improving maternal and child health through maternal education is especially important, given that more than 5 million children globally still die before reaching their 5th birthday, mostly from preventable illness [2]. Health education efforts aimed at promoting behaviors like breastfeeding and kangaroo http://www.jmir.org/2019/1/e12128/. J Med Internet Res 2019 | vol 21 | iss. 1 (page number not for citation purposes) mother care lie at the heart of many successful efforts to reduce child mortality but increasing accessibility and dissemination. Human-Centered Design of Global Health of such health education remains challenging [3,4,5]
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