JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite various global health crises, the prevention and handling of unintentional childhood injuries remains an important public health objective. While several systematic reviews examined the effectiveness of different child injury prevention measures, these reviews did not address the evaluation of mobile communication intervention tools. Whether and how mobile applications were evaluated provides information on the extent to which communication theories, models and evidence-based knowledge were taken into account. Previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of mobile applications increases when respective theories and evidence are considered during their development.

Objective:

This systematic review aims to identify research on mobile applications dealing with the prevention and handling of unintentional injuries in children and to examine the theoretical and methodological approaches thereof. Additionally, this review analyses the different needs of various target groups of the mobile apps described in the articles.

Methods:

8 electronic databases, ranging from interdisciplinary to medical and technical as well as social sciences databases were searched for original research articles or brief reports in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings. Additionally, the systematic review encompassed a systematic scan of articles published in the BMJ journal “Injury Prevention”. These steps were followed by a snowball search based on the literature references of the articles that were identified through the initial screening. The Articles had to be written in English or German, published between 2008 and 2021 and evaluate mobile applications dealing with the prevention and/or handling of unintentional child injuries. Identified studies (n=5) were analysed by five independent researchers employing an inductive approach. Furthermore, the quality of the studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT).

Results:

5 articles were included and assessed in regards to overall quality theoretical and methodological foundations, assessed variables, the focal app’s architecture as well as the needs of the study participants. The overall study quality was moderate, though part of this classification is due to a lack of details reported in the studies. Each article examined one mobile application aimed at parents and other caregivers. Each article assessed at least one usability- or user experience-related variable, while the needs of included study participants were detailed in only one case. However, none of the studies referred to established theories such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) during the development of the apps.

Conclusions:

The future development and evaluation of apps dealing with the prevention and handling of child injuries should combine insights into existing models on user experience and usability with established theories on mobile information behaviour. This theory-based approach will increase the validity of such evaluation studies.