MENTER: Co-Designing an mHealth Peer Navigator Intervention for People with Disabilities

Abstract

Adjusting to a newly acquired disability and transitioning from in-patient rehabilitation to community living poses numerous challenges for many individuals. Peer navigators are people from the local community with specialized training to help people break down barriers to independent living through a structured intervention process. Unfortunately, accessing in-person interventions and resources can be difficult for many people with disabilities. Remote delivery of peer navigator interventions can be an effective approach to overcoming access to supportive services. Utilizing a co-design approach with peer navigators, we designed a mobile health (mHealth) application to enhance remote delivery of a peer navigator intervention aimed at empowering people with physical disabilities returning to community living after in-patient rehabilitation. We organized three co-design workshops with four peer navigators. These workshops included persona development as well as developing and fine-Tuning both low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes and improving their usability. Our results demonstrate the importance of including users as co-designers in order to ensure an empathy-centric design.