MINISTOP 2.0 : a smartphone app integrated in primary child health care to promote healthy diet and physical activity behaviors and prevent obesity in preschool-aged children

Abstract

BackgroundChildhood overweight and obesity is currently estimated to affect 39 million children under the age of five worldwide. After the COVID-19 pandemic, further increases have been observed in several countries including Sweden, where an increased incidence was observed in 3-and 4-year-old children, especially in disadvantaged areas. This development emphasizes the urgent need for population-based childhood obesity prevention interventions, and Swedish primary child health care provides an ideal setting for primary preventive efforts during the preschool years. However, thus far, previous child health care-based obesity prevention interventions have demonstrated limited effectiveness. As previous interventions also have been face-to-face delivered and thus resource-demanding; new, and scalable ways of delivering interventions also need to be evaluated. Mobile health or mHealth refers to the use of mobile devices for medical and public health practice and provides opportunity for development and dissemination of digital interventions for various purposes and populations at scale. This thesis reports the results of the MINISTOP 2.0 project, which covers the development and evaluation of the MINISTOP 2.0 digital intervention, from adaptation and translation of the intervention to Somali, Arabic and English (Paper I), to evaluation of real-world effectiveness within the Swedish primary child health care setting (Paper II) followed by exploration of user experiences and implementation aspects (Paper III) and a cost-consequence analysis of the intervention costs (Paper IV). AimThe overall aim of this thesis was to evaluate whether a 6-month parentoriented mHealth intervention (MINISTOP 2.0 app), embedded in the routine services of Swedish primary child health care, can be used to improve diet and physical activity behaviors, and decrease the prevalence of overweight and obesity in 2.5-to-3-year-old children. MethodsThe MINISTOP 2.0 project utilized a hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation study design to enable simultaneous evaluation and exploration of intervention effectiveness, user experiences and implementation aspects. Paper I: A qualitative exploration of user requirements in an app-based parental support intervention was conducted through three focus group interviews with Somali-(n = 5), Arabic-(n = 4), and Swedish-speaking