Previously submitted to: JMIR mHealth and uHealth (no longer under consideration since Jun 18, 2021)
Date Submitted: Mar 27, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 1, 2019 - May 27, 2019
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The intervening role of mHealth apps in postpartum obesity and mental health
Background:
The development of mHealth (mobile health) has changed people’s routines of improving self-management. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of the apps depends on the frequency of use.
Objective:
This paper introduces a new framework of fitness apps associated with obesity modeling by using structural equation modeling (SEM) and examining data of postpartum women through moderation analysis. Fitness mHealth apps are considered the moderator in the research framework.
Methods:
Online questionnaires were sent to Malaysian postpartum women within one year after pregnancy and 468 completed questionnaires were returned. The frequency of mHealth fitness app use was categorized into four groups: daily, weekly, rarely and never. Therefore, four models were considered for the final analysis.
Results:
According to the output, every model has a different structure in terms of significance and coefficients. The R-squared obtained for the “daily” model (0.82) is the highest, followed by the “weekly” (0.79), “rarely” (0.66) and “never use” (0.59) models. This infers that 82% of mental health variation is related to the demographics, lifestyle, healthy and unhealthy food intake and BMI of daily fitness app users. In addition, the impact of BMI on mental health in every model is significant with a negative coefficient, which implies that users with high BMI have less mental health issues. Meanwhile, the factor loading analysis indicates that the screen time (0.89) and physical activity (0.81) indicators are the two highest coefficients in the lifestyle variable. This result is subsequently equivalent to the daily and weekly fitness app users who choose to consume more healthy food and thus have a lower BMI.
Conclusions:
This paper proves that Malaysian postpartum women who use fitness apps as part of their daily life are more disciplined and such applications have significant effects on obesity and mental health. However, for never or weekly users, the statistical analysis shows there is no proof of the effectiveness of self-management activities that affected on obesity and mental health. Therefore, the frequency of fitness app use acts as a moderator in postpartum obesity and mental health modeling.
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