JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease of childhood. Caregivers often report lacking knowledge in several aspects of asthma management at home. While the use of mHealth tools such as mobile applications could facilitate asthma self-management and simultaneously collect data for research, few studies have explored the features that caregivers would like to see in such a tool and their perception for data sharing.

Objective:

This study evaluated caregivers’ perceived knowledge gaps in asthma management, their perception of certain features and resources that should be included in a potential mobile application, and any concerns that they may have on data sharing for research, including privacy and security.

Methods:

In this cross-sectional study, we surveyed 200 caregivers of children aged 1-13 years with asthma followed at a pediatric tertiary care center in Montreal, Canada. Anonymous data was collected through the institutional online survey platform. We collected the participant’s answers using a 5-category Likert scale (completely agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, completely disagree), multiple choice questions, and free text questions on the topics above. Descriptive statistics were performed and answers were compared between caregivers of preschool- and school-aged children.

Results:

Participating children had a mean(standard deviation) age of 5.9(3.4) years, with 54% aged ≤5 years and 46% >6 years. Overall, caregivers reported having adequate knowledge about asthma and asthma self-management. Nonetheless, they identified several desirable features for a mobile application focused on asthma self-management. The most frequently identified features include receiving alerts about environmental triggers of asthma (76.9%), having videos demonstrating symptoms of asthma (66.8%), and being able to log their child’s asthma action plan in the application (66.8%). Interestingly, more caregivers of preschool-aged children preferred textual information compared to caregivers of school-aged children (P=.008 for explaining asthma and P=.005 for the symptoms of asthma). Caregivers were generally highly in favor of sharing data collected through a mobile application for research.

Conclusions:

Caregivers of children with asthma in our study identified several desirable educational and interactive features to have in a mobile app for asthma self-management. These findings provide a foundation for designing and developing mHealth tools that are relevant to caregivers of children with asthma.