Interventions in mHealth have had positive effects on establishing and maintaining breastfeeding, but we still do not know what content women consult when downloading a breastfeeding mobile application. We conducted an observational, descriptive, and retrospective study using the data recorded by LactApp in 2019. The most frequently consulted topics were those related to breastfeeding technique, infant sleep, human milk management and storage, breastfeeding myths, breastfeeding stages, complementary feeding, infant care, and returning to work. Our study results suggest that LactApp's support seems to develop with mothers' needs according to their infant's development stage. The first breastfeeding days include more physiological answers. Between 15 days and 3 months, mothers look for support in topics like breastfeeding crisis/complications and returning to work. At 3 months to 1 year, answers are related to complementary feeding and weaning. When the user's infant is 1 year of age, mothers seek support for weaning, weaning management, and tandem breastfeeding.
Background: Mobile applications related to health issues are currently expanding.Different uses of new technologies have produced positive results regarding breastfeeding support. Breastfeeding applications are increasing.Objective: We conducted a descriptive analysis of a mobile application for breastfeeding (LactApp) to study the user profile and the most frequent queries.
Materials and Methods:This was a retrospective, comparative and descriptive ecological time series study of LactApp from 2016 to 2019. Google Analytics and the app itself were used for data collection. The data were analysed in Excel, and for the time series, Prais-Winsten auto-regressions were applied based on the Durbin-Watson method in Stata.Results: A total of 115,830 users and 71,780 infants were registered in the application. A total of 1.91% of these users obtained the medical version. The application was used for both queries and surveys and for users to interact through chat. A total of 30.17% of the responses were related with "baby's sleep" (8.94%), 8.91% were related to "preservation of milk", 6.16% were related to "breastfeeding crisis", and 6.15% were related to "physiological evolution of breastfeeding", all with an increasing trend.
Conclusion:LactApp is a resource for breastfeeding that is widely downloaded and used by a substantial number of individuals. The most recurring topics were baby's sleep, milk extraction and preservation, breastfeeding crisis and physiological evolution of breastfeeding.
Introduction:Breastfeeding is an unquestionable right of mothers and their children; however, it is not a one-woman job. For breastfeeding to succeed, women must have access to appropriate support and guidance. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent restriction measures and lockdown to reduce community spread of the disease have negatively impacted breastfeeding support from health services and thus, in mothers' breastfeeding experiences.Objective: The present study aims to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on breastfeeding consultations in LactApp (a mobile app for mHealth focused on breastfeeding support, www.lactapp.com) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Materials and Methods: We conducted an observational, descriptive, and retrospective study with LactApp data recorded between July 2018 and March 2021 including 9,151,456 queries classified in 48 topics among 137,327 active users. We used Interrupted time series model to evaluate the increase of number of queries consulted and active users due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilcoxon test was used to study the increase of certain topics due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Results: LactApp active users increased by 12,092 users (p-value<0.001) during the COVID-19 outbreak and confinement and queries consulted in LactApp also significantly increased by 10,899 queries per month after the pandemic outbreak. The breastfeeding topics that significantly increased are those related to growth spurts, breastfeeding stages, breastfeeding technique, breast pain and mastitis, problems with infants not gaining weight correctly, hypogalactia, increased milk demand, and relactation. These findings are important to understand the potential of online tools when face-to-face professional support is unavailable.
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