Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 1, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 3, 2018 - Dec 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Apr 20, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Tracker-based personal advice to support the baby’s healthy development in a novel parenting app: data-driven innovation
ABSTRACT
Background:
The current generation of millennial parents prefer digital communications and make use of apps on a daily basis to find information about child-rearing topics. Given this, an increasing amount of parenting apps have become available. These apps also allow parents to track the baby’s development with increasing completeness and precision. The large amounts of data collected in this process provide ample opportunity for data-driven innovation (DDI). Subsequently, apps are increasingly personalised by offering information based on the data tracked in the app. In line with this, Philips Avent has developed the uGrow app, a medical grade app dedicated to new parents for tracking their baby’s development. Via so-called insights the uGrow app seeks to provide a data-driven solution by offering parents personal advice based on user-tracked behavioural and contextual data.
Objective:
The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to give a description of the development process of the insights for the uGrow app. Secondly, it presents results from a pilot study on parents’ experiences with the insights.
Methods:
The study consisted of three phases: a formative, development and summative phase. In the formative phase three sub-studies were executed in series to understand and identify parents’ and health care professionals’ (HCPs) needs for insights, using qualitative and quantitative methods. After completion of the formative phase, insights were created during the development phase. Subsequently, in the summative phase these insights were validated against parents’ experience using a quantitative approach.
Results:
As part of the formative phase parents indicated having a need for smart information based on data analysis of the data they track in an app. HCPs supported the general concept of insights for the uGrow app, although specific types of insights were considered irrelevant or even risky. When implementing a preliminary set of insights in a prototype version of the uGrow app and testing them with parents, the majority of parents (87%) were satisfied with the insights. Based on these outcomes, a total of 89 insights were implemented in a final version of the uGrow app. In the summative phase, the majority of parents reported experiencing these insights as reassuring and useful (94%), as adding enjoyment (85%), and as motivating to continue tracking for a longer period of time (77%).
Conclusions:
Parents experienced the insights in the uGrow app as useful and reassuring, and as adding enjoyment to usage of the uGrow app and tracking the baby’s development. The insights development process we followed showed how quality of the insights can be guaranteed by ensuring insights are relevant, appropriate, and evidence-based. In this way, insights are an example of meaningful data-driven innovation.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
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