| dc.description.abstract | Community health workers (CHW) serve a large proportion of the population in low- and middle-income countries and have a variety of duties, including conducting health promotion in the communities. CHWs, as well as the community they work with, need ways of sustaining the knowledge they receive. Video is a medium that is well-suited for acquiring knowledge. Embedding videos in an electronic patient information system could therefore contribute to increased sustainability. This thesis explores the usefulness of videos for CHWs and how a video feature could be implemented in the District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) Android Capture app. Since the current version of the Android app does not support videos, this thesis saw the implementation of a video library. The design of our implemented interfaces was largely based on the interfaces of existing applications and the usage of standard Android UI elements. The video library was tested among a selection of CHWs in Malawi in order to identify common thoughts, opinions, and ideas for the video functionality. Through interviews, feedback indicates that videos are a coveted feature among the CHWs. Two main areas of video usage were explored in this thesis: Videos for health promotion and videos for training and re-training of the CHWs. Health promotion and re-training proved to be areas well suited for videos, but videos should not completely replace traditional training. Benefits such as higher knowledge retention, less memorization for the CHWs, the physical aspects of an electronic device, and increased interest among the clients were mentioned. Additionally, using videos in health promotion would make it easier to appeal to parts of the community that are difficult to reach. While we had based elements of our video library’s interface on standard design patterns, these patterns turned out to not necessarily be standard to all the CHWs in Malawi. Feedback from the CHWs suggests that parts of the interface were easy to understand and use, such as controlling the video player and navigating the listing of videos. However, elements like the search bar and navigation from the video player back to the video library proved to be difficult for the CHWs to use. To overcome this, frequent user testing or discovering and documenting universally understood design patterns, as well as standards among the CHWs in Malawi, is needed. We also highlight several important factors pertinent to a successful adoption of this video-based intervention. Among these are the screen size of devices, the support for multi-language videos, and the resolution and encoding of the video files. | eng |