JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Even through various global health crises, the prevention and handling of unintentional childhood injuries remains an important public health objective. While several systematic reviews already examined the effectiveness of different types of 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 information were taken into account. Previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of mobile applications increases when they are developed and evaluated theory- and evidence-based.

Objective:

This systematic review aims to identify research on mobile apps dealing with the prevention and handling of unintentional injuries in children and to examine the different theoretical and methodological approaches of the identified studies. Additionally, our study analyses the different needs of various target groups of the mobile apps described in the identified papers.

Methods:

We utilised online databases ranging from Scopus and Web of Science to medical and technical databases such as PubMed or IEEE Xplore, to social sciences databases like Communication & Mass Media Complete or Communication abstracts for the years 2008-2021. Original research articles or brief reports in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings/papers that evaluated mobile applications in unintentional child injury prevention were included. The quality of the studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT), which was developed to evaluate the quality of studies with different designs.

Results:

We identified five relevant papers that fit all of our inclusion criteria. The overall study quality was moderate, though part of this classification is due to a lack of details reported in the studies. Each paper examined one mobile application aimed at parents and other caregivers. None of the studies referred to established approaches for researching the usability of an application or other existing theories during the development of the apps.

Conclusions:

The future development and evaluation of apps dealing with the prevention and handling of childhood accidents should combine insights into existing models on user experience and usability with established theories on mobile information behaviour. With this, the research focus can shift from the technical development and first-phase studies on unconnected variables to collecting evaluation data derived from theories and models to increase their validity.