Abstract
Pregnant smokers may benefit from digital smoking cessation interventions, but few have been designed for this population. The aim was to transparently report the development of a smartphone app designed to aid smoking cessation during pregnancy. The development of a smartphone app (‘SmokeFree Baby’) to help pregnant women stop smoking was guided by frameworks for developing complex interventions, including the Medical Research Council (MRC), Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) and Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW). Two integrative behaviour change theories provided the theoretical base. Evidence from the scientific literature and behaviour change techniques (BCTs) from the BCT Taxonomy v1 informed the intervention content. The app was developed around five core modules, each with a distinct intervention target (identity change, stress management, health information, promoting use of face-to-face support and behavioural substitution) and available in a ‘control’ or ‘full’ version. SmokeFree Baby has been developed as part of a multiphase intervention optimization to identify the optimum combination of intervention components to include in smartphone apps to help pregnant smokers stop smoking.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13142-016-0438-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Maternal smoking is detrimental to foetal development and is the leading avoidable cause of prenatal and neonatal mortality and morbidity in high-income Western countries [1, 2]
The development of a smartphone app (‘SmokeFree Baby’) to help pregnant women stop smoking was guided by frameworks for developing complex interventions, including the Medical Research Council (MRC), Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) and Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW)
This paper provides a comprehensive description of (i) the intervention development of a smoking cessation smartphone app for pregnant smokers and (ii) the ways in which methodological and theoretical frameworks and evidence from the scientific literature have been translated into specific intervention components in the app
Summary
Maternal smoking is detrimental to foetal development and is the leading avoidable cause of prenatal and neonatal mortality and morbidity in high-income Western countries [1, 2]. Behavioural support [3] and a combination of different forms of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) [4] are effective in helping pregnant women quit smoking, but challenges in access to effective care remain. In the financial year of 2014–2015, only 18,887 pregnant smokers (approximately 26.6 % of pregnant smokers) set a quit date at face-to-face smoking cessation services in England [5, 6]. Practice: The intervention development process of the SmokeFree Baby app can be adapted to develop future digital behaviour change interventions. Policy: The development and content of digital smoking cessation interventions should be transparently reported. Research: Developing a modular smoking cessation smartphone app can provide a basis for evaluating the effects of individual intervention components Potential barriers to engaging with faceto-face support involve fear of being judged, poor access to health care facilities and negative attitudes Implications
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