Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 4, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 5, 2018 - Nov 12, 2018
Date Accepted: Jan 14, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effective Engagement of Adolescent Asthma Patients With Mobile Health–Supporting Medication Adherence
Background:
Mobile health (mHealth) apps have the potential to support patients’ medication use and are therefore increasingly used. Apps with broad functionality are suggested to be more effective; however, not much is known about the actual use of different functionalities and the effective engagement.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to explore the use and the effective engagement of adolescents (aged 12 to 18 years) with the Adolescent Adherence Patient Tool (ADAPT).
Methods:
The ADAPT intervention consisted of an app for patients, which was connected to a management system for their pharmacist. The aim of the ADAPT intervention was to improve medication adherence and, therefore, the app contained multiple functionalities: questionnaires to monitor symptoms and adherence, medication reminders, short movies, pharmacist chat, and peer chat. For this study, data of the ADAPT study and a cluster randomized controlled trial were used. Adolescents with asthma had 6 months’ access to the ADAPT intervention, and all app usage was securely registered in a log file.
Results:
In total, 86 adolescents (mean age 15.0, SD 2.0 years) used the ADAPT app 17 times (range 1-113) per person. Females used the app more often than males (P=.01) and for a longer period of time (P=.03). On average, 3 different functionalities were used, and 13% of the adolescents used all functionalities of the app. The questionnaires to monitor symptoms and adherence were used by most adolescents. The total app use did not affect adherence; however, activity in the pharmacist chat positively affected medication adherence (P=.03), in particular, if patients sent messages to their pharmacist (P=.01).
Conclusions:
mHealth apps for adolescents with asthma should contain different functionalities to serve the diverging needs and preferences of individual patients. Suggested key functionalities to promote use and effectiveness in adolescents with asthma are questionnaires to monitor symptoms and a health care provider chat.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.