An Interactive Story-based Mobile Application with Personal Recommendation and Notification for Sexual Health Education in Ethnic Adolescents

Abstract

In mountainous border areas, most hill tribe and ethnic adolescents encounter poverty and limited access to good quality of education and healthcare services. They are confronting the severity and high rate of Unplanned Pregnancy (UP) and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) population due to their sexual misconception, risky behaviors, contextual belief, and negative attitudes, and improper pedagogical instructions and materials. In this study, the Akha ethnic group in Thailand was considered as they are facing the highest number of UP and STDs among other hill tribes in the northern region of Thailand. Therefore, the authors aim to address these critical issues by proposing a mobile learning application for enhancing their understanding of Sexual Health Education (SHE), STDs and UP prevention through a designed interactive learning story with context-based storytelling. The students can get personal recommendation of first-aid instruction and nearby contact points based on their search queries of symptom, conditions, or keywords. Moreover, the application can analyze their responses during learning for giving personal notifications based on their sexual behaviors, and remind the users regularly for having safe sex. Before this application is successfully developed, this study firstly carried out the contextual analysis of their needs and requirement in order to design the associated content for interactive learning story, to propose a system structure and design and to present a mechanism for personal recommendation and notification. The evaluation was later conducted with similar groups of samples and experts towards the proposed interactive learning story and application prototyping. The findings show that the proposed mobile application received satisfied attitudes and perceptions on both learning content and story, and mobile learning experience. The investigations of learning effects on students in formal and informal learning environments are to be studied.