Exploration of mothers’ engagement with the Growing healthy program: a week by week app to promote healthy infant feeding practices

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Exploration of mothers’ engagement with the Growing healthy program: a week by week app to promote healthy infant feeding practices Sarah Taki1, 2*, Georgina Russell1, 2, Karen Campbell2, 3, Rachel Laws2, 3 and Elizabeth Denney-Wilson1, 2 1 University of Technology Sydney, Australia 2 Centre for Obesity Managment & Prevention Research Excellence in Primary Health Care, Australia 3 Deakn University, Australia Introduction Interventions for the prevention of childhood obesity are vital if the current trends in obesity are to be reversed. Participation and take-up of interventions is crucial to the success, but little work has explored participant engagement with interventions and effects on intervention outcomes. We aimed to explore factors that influenced mothers’ engagement with the Growing healthy program: a mHealth intervention targeting healthy infant feeding practices for socio-economically disadvantaged mothers. Methods/ Results One–on–one semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of mothers (n=20) participating in the Growing healthy program when their babies were 9 months old. Participants with high and low levels of engagement were sampled. The interview guide explored the perceptions of the various features of the app known to affect engagement. These included usability, delivery of the program, quality, design and navigation of the app. Participants varied in their level of engagement with the app, as derived from the app analytics (e.g. number of pages viewed). Data were analysed using a thematic analysis approach. This study will present the features of the app that mothers found useful and engaging and also identify features that were unhelpful or disliked (results are forthcoming) thus identifying opportunities for improving app design and heightening engagement strategies in obesity prevention interventions. Conclusions/implications This is the first study to develop and implement an app supporting mothers with healthy infant feeding behaviours and provides insights to assist further child obesity interventions. Acknowledgements The research reported in this paper is a project of the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, which is supported by a grant from the Australian government Department of Health and Ageing. The information and opinions contained in it do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute or the Australian government Department of Health and Ageing. Keywords: Infant feeding, Mothers, mHealth, APP, engagement Conference: 2nd Behaviour Change Conference: Digital Health and Wellbeing, London, United Kingdom, 24 Feb - 25 Feb, 2016. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: Academic Citation: Taki S, Russell G, Campbell K, Laws R and Denney-Wilson E (2016). Exploration of mothers’ engagement with the Growing healthy program: a week by week app to promote healthy infant feeding practices. Front. Public Health. Conference Abstract: 2nd Behaviour Change Conference: Digital Health and Wellbeing. doi: 10.3389/conf.FPUBH.2016.01.00110 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 27 Nov 2015; Published Online: 09 Jan 2016. * Correspondence: Ms. Sarah Taki, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, sarah_taki@hotmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Sarah Taki Georgina Russell Karen Campbell Rachel Laws Elizabeth Denney-Wilson Google Sarah Taki Georgina Russell Karen Campbell Rachel Laws Elizabeth Denney-Wilson Google Scholar Sarah Taki Georgina Russell Karen Campbell Rachel Laws Elizabeth Denney-Wilson PubMed Sarah Taki Georgina Russell Karen Campbell Rachel Laws Elizabeth Denney-Wilson Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.