In Research Cluster 2 (WP2) "Need-based Public Health Technology", we will focus on understanding how technologies can support individual and community health needs. Within WP2, we will focus on three main aspects.

• First, after identifying and describing individual and community health needs, we design, develop, and evaluate novel interfaces for individuals and communities to provide data to digital public health programs and specialists.
• We are also exploring novel automated approaches to detect positive and negative impacts of both physical and virtual environments on public health.
• This will allow us, in a third step, to provide novel personalized prevention and health promotion interventions for different populations.

As technologies are very dynamic and fast moving, it is important to enable an adaptive and iterative process. We will take a user-centered design approach, as we believe that understanding user needs and providing a high degree of usability and user experience are key to developing successful digital public health interventions. This includes, but is not limited to, iterations between theoretical reflection, prototype building, and formal and informal testing with users. Within each year, we plan several iterations in which theoretical questions and insights gained through reflection on empirical observations are incorporated into prototype development to evaluate and explore theories. In this way, we aim to gain a better understanding of user needs, interests, and perspectives on digital technologies for public health.

Research in this area will combine formative research with conceptual work on digital innovation to identify implicit needs beyond the conscious realm of individual and community users, as well as public health stakeholders.

Experts include Rainer Malaka (Sprecher RC2) Wolfang Ahrens, Ingrid Darmann-Finck, Ulrike Haug, Lucia Reisch, Heinz Rothgang, Tanja Schultz, Karin Wolf-Ostermann, Stefan Rach, Antje Hebestreit, Max Westphal (MEVIS), Horst Hahn (MEVIS) and Hajo Zeeb.