A Mobile App-Based Intervention (Parentbot-a Digital Healthcare Assistant) for Parents: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Mobile app-based interventions are viable methods of delivering perinatal care support to parents. A mobile app-based intervention entitled Parentbot-a Digital Healthcare Assistant (PDA) was developed and evaluated via a randomized controlled trial. PDA aimed to provide informational, socioemotional, and psychological support to parents across the perinatal period. As developing such interventions is resource intensive, it is important to evaluate participants' use and the components that are appreciated by them.

Objective: This study aims to examine the (1) relationship between participants' characteristics and PDA use, (2) relationship between PDA use and parenting outcomes, and (3) relationship between participants' characteristics and the time taken to respond to the surveys (survey response timing).

Methods: This study is the secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial. A convenient sample of 118 heterosexual couples (236 participants: n=118, 50% mothers and n=118, 50% fathers) from a public tertiary hospital in Singapore were recruited. Data were collected from November 2022 to August 2023. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the parents' characteristics and study variables. Linear mixed models were used to examine the effect of (1) participants' sociodemographic characteristics on PDA use metrics, (2) use metrics on parenting outcomes, and (3) participants' sociodemographic characteristics on the survey response timing. The Pearson correlation was also used to examine the linear relationships between the PDA use metrics and parenting outcomes.

Results: The following parental characteristics were found to be associated with PDA use: antenatal course attendance, gender, religion, ethnicity, and the number of children. After adjusting for baseline values and sociodemographic covariates, only the viewing of educational materials was statistically significantly associated with improvements in parents' anxiety (β=-0.48, 95% CI -0.94 to -0.009; P=.046), parent-child bonding (β=-0.10, 95% CI -0.19 to -0.01; P=.03), social support (β=0.31, 95% CI 0.08-0.54; P=.01), and parenting satisfaction (β=0.57, 95% CI 0.07-1.07; P=.03) at 1 month post partum. Moreover, parents' age, ethnicity, grouping, and number of children were found to be related to the survey response timing.

Conclusions: As the viewing of PDA's educational materials was linked to improvements in parents' perinatal well-being, the provision of educational resources should be prioritized in future app-based parenting interventions. Because the use of other PDA features, such as poster activities, forum posts, and reflection and gratitude exercises, had a limited effect in improving parents' well-being, future interventions could explore alternative activities to better engage parents. Future mobile app-based parenting interventions could conduct similar evaluations on app use and the effectiveness of specific features to validate the findings of this study.