Enhancing medicinal plant literacy for disease management through the MOTOGA application among community members of Sedayu 2 Health Centre, Bantul, Indonesia

Public literacy regarding medicinal plants remains low despite their increasing use across various societal groups. Digital technology offers opportunities as a convenient and efficient educational medium to support the improvement of herbal-based health knowledge. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of MOTOGA in increasing public knowledge about medicinal plants. The study employed a pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design with 42 respondents from the Sedayu 2 community health center area. The intervention was conducted utilizing MOTOGA for a period of two weeks. The level of knowledge was measured using a validated, standardized questionnaire, with subsequent analysis employing the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, followed by a paired t-test or the Wilcoxon test. The results at the implementation stage demonstrated a significant increase of 20% to 30% in knowledge scores. A significant increase was also found in gastrointestinal knowledge, with an average score rising from 8.81 ± 2.5 to 13.02 ± 1.76, p < 0.001. This finding supports the implementation of digital literacy programs to enhance community knowledge of herbal medicine.