Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Nov 30, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 30, 2021
Participants’ engagement and satisfaction with a smartphone app intended to support a healthy weight gain, diet, and physical activity during pregnancy: The HealthyMoms trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Excessive gestational weight gain (GWG) is common and associated with negative health outcomes for both mother and child. Mobile health (mHealth) delivered lifestyle interventions offer potential to mitigate excessive GWG. The effectiveness of a smartphone application (app; HealthyMoms) was recently evaluated in a randomized controlled trial.
Objective:
This qualitative study explored engagement and satisfaction of the 6-month usage of the HealthyMoms app.
Methods:
A total of 19 women (mean age 31.7 [SD 4.4] years; mean BMI 24.6 [SD 3.4] kg/m2; educational attainment 68%; primiparous 58%) who received the HealthyMoms app in a randomized controlled trial, completed semi-structured exit interviews. The interviews were recorded (audio) and fully transcribed, coded and analyzed using thematic analysis with an inductive approach.
Results:
Thematic analysis revealed one main theme and two subthemes. The main theme ‘One could suit many – a multi-functional tool to strengthen women’s health during pregnancy’ and the two subthemes ‘Factors within and beyond the app influence app engagement’ and ‘Trust, knowledge, and awareness – aspects that can motivate healthy habits’ illustrated that a trustworthy and appreciated health and pregnancy app that is easy to use can inspire a healthy lifestyle during pregnancy. The first subtheme discussed how factors within the app (e.g., regular updates and feedback) were perceived to motivate both healthy habits and app engagement. Additionally, factors beyond the app were described to both motivate (e.g., interest, motivation, and curiosity) and limit (e.g., pregnancy-related complications, lack of time) app engagement. The second subtheme reflected important aspects such as high trustworthiness of the app, increased knowledge, and awareness from using the app, which motivated participants to improve or maintain healthy habits during pregnancy.
Conclusions:
The HealthyMoms app was considered a valuable and trustworthy tool to mitigate excessive GWG, with useful features and relevant information to initiate and maintain healthy habits during pregnancy. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03298555
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.