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Record W4414111647 · doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0005034

How to make an app-based program work and show how it works

2025· article· en· W4414111647 on OpenAlexafffund
Ricky Janssen, Nora Engel, Anja Krumeich, Aliasgar Esmail, Keertan Dheda, Réjean Thomas, Nitika Pant Pai

Bibliographic record

VenuePLOS Global Public Health · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicHIV/AIDS Research and Interventions
Canadian institutionsMcGill University Health Centre
FundersFonds de Recherche du Québec - SantéCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchGrand Challenges CanadaSouth African Medical Research CouncilInstitut de recherche, Centre universitaire de santé McGill
KeywordsDigital healthWork (physics)Process (computing)Field (mathematics)Control (management)UsabilityEmpirical research

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

For digital health interventions, the "gold standard" of evaluating effectiveness is the randomized control trial (RCT). Yet, RCT methodology presents issues such as precluding changes to the technology during the study period as well as the use of study settings that do not reflect "real world" contexts. In this paper, we draw on empirical material from our ethnographic research on an app-based program called HIVSmart!, which is a digital strategy designed to support people in the process of HIV self-testing. We explore how this digital health approach was made to work in different contexts, and what this means for monitoring and evaluation of digital health interventions. Our analysis reveals that making technology which is "ease to use" depends on various user practices developed over time and the multiple, shifting users who define this ease of use. Furthermore, it shows that asking whether an app is "working" provides different answers at different moments, as the technology, as well as the human and physical supports around it, change and adapt over time. Therefore, questions around the feasibility of the technology, as well as ongoing monitoring efforts, need to be developed in a way that capture this fluctuation in the technology and its surroundings. Based on our insights, we contribute to implementation science approaches in the field of digital health by putting forward recommendations regarding how we can assess the effectiveness of digital health tools.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.896
Threshold uncertainty score0.751

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.065
GPT teacher head0.387
Teacher spread0.322 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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