The understanding of digital communication experts and oral cancer at-risk persons on oral cancer, their uptake of educational mobile health applications on oral cancer, and their opinions on how a good application of such should look like: findings from a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: Existing educational mobile health applications (MHAs) on oral cancer are not very effective due to the features they possessed. To create an educational MHA on oral cancer with superior features, this study explored MHA creators (digital communication experts) and persons at risk of oral cancer (potential end-users of educational MHA on oral cancer) on their understanding of oral cancer, their uptake of educational MHAs on oral cancer, and how a good MHA on oral cancer should look like. METHODS: This qualitative study involved four online focus group discussions among seventeen digital communication experts, sexually active persons, and tobacco/alcohol users, who were recruited from five countries through volunteer sampling technique. Collected data was thematically analysed. RESULTS: Some participants had misconceptions on oral cancer. Although, majority of them opined that MHA will be useful in improving literacy on oral cancer, but none of them had ever used an educational MHA on oral cancer before. Features such as having oral health tips, ability to geospatially locate dental surgeries, streak functions, user-friendliness, basic operability, inclusivity, absence of advertisements, auto-notification functions, ability to operate offline, online, and at a high speed, ability to have a personal tracker, informative content on oral cancer in diverse formats (e.g. texts, infographics, and videos), and operability in multiple languages were identified as the most important features such MHA should have. CONCLUSION: The findings generated from this qualitative study identified educational MHA to be a useful tool for improving literacy on oral cancer. Also, the study findings have provided insightful ideas needed for the creation of a more comprehensive and inclusive mobile health application that can be used to educate diverse populations on oral cancer.