Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Oct 28, 2022
Date Accepted: Jan 12, 2023
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Evaluating the effects of the Supportive Parenting App (SPA) on infant developmental outcomes: A longitudinal study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Previous literature has investigated the various effects of parenting on infant developmental outcomes. In particular, parental stress and social support have been found to significantly affect the growth of their newborn. Although many parents today are using mobile applications to obtain more support on parenting and perinatal care, few studies have examined how these mobile applications could affect infant development.
Objective:
This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of the SPA in improving infant developmental outcomes during the perinatal period.
Methods:
This study adopted a two-group parallel prospective longitudinal design, where 200 infants and their parents (N=400 mothers and fathers) were recruited for the study. The parents were recruited at 24 weeks of gestation for a randomized controlled trial that was conducted from February 2020 to July 2022. They were randomly allocated to intervention and control groups. The infant outcome measures included cognition, language, motor skills, and social-emotional development. Data were collected from the infants when they were two months, four months, six months, nine months, and twelve months old. Linear and modified Poisson regression were used to analyse the data to examine between and within group changes.
Results:
At nine and 12 months postpartum, infants in the intervention group were found to have better communication and language skills compared to infants in the control group. Analysis of motor development revealed that a larger proportion of infants in the control group fell under the at-risk category, where they scored about two standard deviations below the normative scores. Control group infants scored higher on the problem-solving domain at six months postpartum. However, at 12 months postpartum, infants in the intervention group performed better on cognitive tasks than those in the control group. Despite not being statistically significant, the intervention group infants were found to have consistently scored better on the social components of the questionnaires than the control group infants.
Conclusions:
Overall, infants whose parents had received the SPA intervention tended to fare better in most developmental outcome measures than those whose parents had received standard care only. The findings of this study suggest that the SPA intervention exerted positive effects on the communication, cognition, motor, and socio-emotional development of infants. Further research is needed to improve the content and support provided by the intervention so as to maximize the benefits incurred by infants and their parents. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04706442
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