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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Participant engagement is an important consideration in mHealth interventions and there are no standardised measurements available to guide researchers. This paper describes the engagement index customised for the Milk Man app, a mobile app designed to engage fathers with breastfeeding and parenting information. Participants were recruited from maternity hospitals in Perth, Western Australia. An engagement index with scores ranging from 0 to 100 was calculated. Kaplan Meier survival analysis was used to determine difference in duration of exclusive breastfeeding, and Pearson’s chi square analysis was conducted to investigate the association of engagement level with demographic characteristics and exclusive breastfeeding at 6 weeks. While overall, partners of participants who installed Milk Man were less likely to have ceased exclusive breastfeeding at any time point from birth to six weeks postpartum, this result was modest and of borderline significance (log rank test p = 0.052; Breslow p = 0.046; Tarone-Ware p = 0.049). The mean engagement score was 29.7% (range 1–80%), median 27.6%. Engagement level had no impact on duration of exclusive breastfeeding and demographic factors were not associated with engagement level. This research demonstrates a range of metrics that can be used to quantify participant engagement. However, more research is needed to identify ways of measuring effective engagement.

Details

Title
Measuring User Engagement with a Socially Connected, Gamified Health Promotion Mobile App
Author
White, Becky K 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Burns, Sharyn K 2 ; Giglia, Roslyn C 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Dhaliwal, Satvinder S 4 ; Scott, Jane A 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 School of Population Health, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia; [email protected] (B.K.W.); [email protected] (S.K.B.) 
 School of Population Health, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia; [email protected] (B.K.W.); [email protected] (S.K.B.); Collaboration for Evidence, Research and Impact in Public Health, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia 
 Foodbank WA, Perth 6105, Australia; [email protected] 
 Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, Curtin University, Perth 6845, Australia; [email protected]; Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore; Institute for Research in Molecular Medicine (INFORMM), University of Science, Pukau Pinang 11800, Malaysia 
First page
5626
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
ISSN
1661-7827
e-ISSN
1660-4601
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2662986708
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.