More than just a Saturday morning cartoon: Utilizing participatory animation for digital health intervention promotion (Preprint)

<sec> <title>UNSTRUCTURED</title> Digital-based health interventions (DHIs), defined as health services delivered electronically, have proven to be effective tools for health promotion. However, user retention remains low, an outcome predicted by insufficient integration of socio-cultural determinants and limited user engagement. This study explores participatory animation (PA), a methodology involving community partnerships in creating animated content as a strategy to mitigate retention rates. PA is a multi-step production process capable of creating engaging and efficacious multimedia deployable stimuli while leveraging a co-creation process through participants’ oral and visual design assessment. However, this method has been historically underutilized in health scholarship. The urgent need to develop effective DHIs emphasizes the promise of PA as a methodological frontier. This paper offers a perspective on PA’s practical and theoretical potential to improve digital intervention design and function from existing literature. </sec>