Proceedings of The 11th International Conference on Research in Behavioral and Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
[PDF]
Stakeholder Analysis on Handheld Platform for HIV Viral Load Self-Testing
Rose Ayiku-Kwei, Dr. Ronald Tonui, Jacqueline Linnes, Kirtika T. Patel
ABSTRACT:
The 95-95-95 target endorsed by UNAIDS, proposes diagnosing 95% of people infected with HIV worldwide, engaging 95% of them on effective antiretroviral treatment, and ensuring that 95% of those treated achieve sustained viral load suppression. The first step was to combine isothermal loop-mediated nucleic acid amplification (LAMP) with a highly sensitive and label-free readout method called particle diffusometry for quantification of HIV viral load in a hand held platform with minimal process steps. The final product will be a quantitative, handheld, viral load self-test device that can be used by patients themselves to support management of HIV while delivering data remotely to healthcare providers. Therefore, our main objective was to perform a baseline assessment on usability and stakeholder views and use the result to improve the final product that will be readily acceptable and adoptable. We did qualitative baseline assessments with stakeholders using 10 focus group discussions with health care providers and patients at the largest HIV clinic in Kenya. Results from the stakeholder analysis indicate that enabling patients to monitor their HIV viral load while remaining connected to healthcare provider helps to reduce barriers to treatment compliance, increases retention in care, reduces patients travel costs, time lost going for clinic appointments and increase in number of patients with sustained viral load suppression. We envision that this views will facilitate in the manufacturing of a highly characterized, sensitive, quantitative handheld HIV viral load detection platform that performs robustly with real clinical samples and is ready for scale up.
keywords: smartphone, Device, Viral load, stakeholder, HIIV, self-test