Designing Migraine Applications : A Qualitative Interview Study on Migraine Patients' Motivation of using Mhealth Applications

Abstract: Migraine is ranked as the third most widespread disease in the world by Global burden of Disease and study 2010. To reduce pressure on health care and also help patientsunderstand their condition, mobile health applications have become increasingly popularand accessible. These applications help by providing disease information, to documentsymptoms and analyze attack patterns. However, there is both a lack of patient centeredperspective and scientific based knowledge behind the design of these applications. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore what might affect the patients’ motivationto use a mobile application to explore their condition. This by looking into how these applications can be designed so that patients’ find them helpful and easy to use. This wasdone by doing a qualitative interview study with ten patients with severe migraine andanalyzing the transcribed data through a reflexive thematic analysis. The thematic analysis resulted in three overarching themes personal motivations of exploring migraine, healthcare related motivations of exploring migraine, and technical support for motivation of exploringmigraine. Each overarching theme contained themes and sub-themes that are backed up byquotes in the data from the interviews. Also a proposal on how to visualize the threeoverarching themes in relation to each other is presented.In conclusion, designing applications that help with acceptance of condition, adaptivecontent and functionality, and deciding on a specific target patient group, are central findings of this study. Directives from health care was found to be the largest motivationaldrive in this study and could further be explored to work better with migraine applications.