BACKGROUND
Childhood obesity is a growing global public health concern. Digital tools could encourage behaviour change for healthy lifestyles, but a better understanding of their strategies, adoption, and impact is needed to ensure that available tools actually benefit users. Health Education England developed a digital app (‘NoObesity’) to facilitate and improve communication between families and healthcare providers and to support healthy lifestyle behaviour change.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of the study was to collect evidence about the adoption and implementation of a family-focused app for childhood obesity prevention to inform further development. Specific objectives included examining the app’s usability, acceptability, and perceived impact, identifying barriers to engaging with the app and to changing behaviour, and gathering suggestions for improvement.
METHODS
225 parents were enrolled to evaluate a family app for childhood obesity prevention. Users’ experiences with the app and its perceived impact on motivation, self-efficacy, and behaviours were analysed based on two conceptual frameworks: the Reach Effectiveness Adoption Implementation Maintenance (RE-AIM) and Non-adoption, Abandonment and Challenges to the Scale-up, Spread and Suitability (NASSS) frameworks. The study took place between March 2020 and April 2021.
RESULTS
Thematic analysis found that goal-setting, prompts, and suggestions helped support parents’ awareness, motivation, and self-efficacy. Motivation and accessibility were key barriers to behaviour, and engagement was limited by a lack of novel content. Key suggestions included more content and improved notifications and progress tracking. Usability scores were ‘average’ (M = 70·3/100, 95% CI: 63·8-76·8).
CONCLUSIONS
Family-focused mobile health apps have potential as acceptable tools to help support healthy behaviour change and the prevention and management of childhood obesity. Feedback from healthcare professionals could improve families’ motivation and self-efficacy but digital tools will need to integrate into existing routines to enable clinical adoption.
CLINICALTRIAL
ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05261555)