Healthcare App Design in Low-Resource Contexts: Challenges, Practices, and Opportunities
Abstract
Digital health technologies are increasingly used to improve healthcare access and delivery worldwide. However, many healthcare applications are designed for environments with stable infrastructure, high digital literacy, and strong institutional support. These assumptions often do not hold in low-resource contexts where healthcare delivery often depends on community health workers, caregivers, and informal care networks. Designing effective healthcare applications for such environments requires attention to infrastructural constraints, cultural contexts, language diversity, and usability challenges. This Birds of a Feather session aims to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in healthcare application design in low-resource contexts. The session will provide an informal forum for discussing challenges encountered in the design and deployment of digital health technologies in underserved settings, sharing field experiences, and identifying opportunities for collaboration within the Interactive Health (IH) community.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.04669,
title = {Healthcare App Design in Low-Resource Contexts: Challenges, Practices, and Opportunities},
author = {Arka Majhi and Aparajita Mondal and Satish B. Agnihotri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.04669},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This paper has been conditionally accepted to the Interactive Health Conference 2026 in Porto, Portugal