JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile application-based interventions are viable methods of delivering perinatal care support to parents. A mobile application-based intervention entitled “Parentbot - a Digital healthcare Assistant (PDA)” was developed and evaluated via a randomized controlled trial. As developing such interventions are resource intensive, it is important to evaluate participants' usage and the components that are appreciated by participants.

Objective:

To examine the (1) relationship between participants’ characteristics and PDA usage, (2) relationship between PDA usage and parenting outcomes, and (3) relationship between participants’ characteristics and the time taken to respond to the surveys (survey response timing).

Methods:

This study is the secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial. A convenient sample of 118 heterosexual couples (236 participants; 118 mothers and 118 fathers) from a public tertiary hospital in Singapore were recruited. Data was collected from November 2022 to August 2023. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the parents’ characteristics and study variables. Linear mixed models were used to examine the effect of (1) participants’ sociodemographic characteristics on PDA usage metrics, (2) usage metrics on parenting outcomes, and (3) participants’ sociodemographic characteristics on the survey response timing. The Pearson correlation was also used to examine the linear relationships between the PDA usage metrics and parenting outcomes.

Results:

The following parental characteristics were found to be statistically significantly associated with PDA usage: antenatal course attendance, gender, religion, ethnicity, and number of children. After adjusting for baseline values and sociodemographic covariates, only the viewing of educational materials was statistically significantly associated with improvements in parents’ anxiety (β=-0.48, 95%CI: -0.94 to -0.009, p=0.046), parent-child bonding (β=-0.10, 95%CI: -0.19 to -0.01, p=0.027), social support (β=0.31, 95%CI: 0.08 to 0.54, p=0.01), and parenting satisfaction (β=0.57, 95%CI: 0.07 to 1.07, p=0.027) at one month postpartum. Moreover, parents’ age, ethnicity, grouping, and number of children were significantly related to the survey response timing.

Conclusions:

As the viewing of PDA’s educational materials was linked to improvements in parents’ perinatal well-being, the provision of educational resources should be prioritized in future application-based parenting interventions. Since the usage of other PDA features such as poster activities, forum posts, and reflection and gratitude exercises had limited effect in improving parents’ well-being, future interventions could explore alternative activities to better engage parents. Future mobile application-based parenting interventions could conduct similar evaluations on application usage and effectiveness of specific features to validate current findings. Clinical Trial: Clinicaltrails.gov (NCT05463926)