Impact of smartphone application usage by mothers in improving oral health and its determinants in early childhood: a randomised controlled trial in a paediatric dental setting

Abstract

Purpose Integration of smartphones has overcome barriers in traditional education; this trial aimed at exploring this ubiquitous platform in oral health education. A smartphone application promoting preschooler’s oral health was designed and its effectiveness was compared with that of common oral health education delivered in paediatric dental settings. Methods This controlled clinical trial was performed on preschooler–mother dyads referring to the clinic of Tehran School of Dentistry in 2019–2020. Initially, the dyads were randomly partitioned to application intervention or common training groups. The mothers answered an interviewer-administered questionnaire on paediatric dentistry knowledge, attitude and practice regarding children’s oral health; modified plaque index (m-PI) and modified gingival index (m-GI) of children were measured. Subsequently, the smartphone application was installed for application intervention group and an educational pamphlet and verbal explanations were given to common training group. In 1-month and 3-month follow-ups, the questionnaires and clinical measurement were re-done. A generalized estimating equation (GEE) was used to investigate the effect of training methods. Results Among the participants 51 dyad attended baseline and follow-up assessments. The preschoolers mean age was 4.6 ± 1.2 years and 54.4% were girls. Both trainings improved mothers’ knowledge and practice regarding children’s oral health and reduced children’s m-PI and m-GI ( p < 0.050). The 3-month follow-up revealed a better m-GI in application intervention group ( p < 0.001). Conclusions Considering the greater improvement of paediatric gingival status in the application intervention group, it appears that smartphone applications may provide a promising tool for more prolonged impacts in children oral health care. Trial registration IRCT, IRCT20131102015238N3. Registered 28 July 2019 https://en.irct.ir/trial/40933 Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40368-022-00731-9.

Development of Information System Documentations Postpartum Obstetrics and Infant Physiology Midwife Integrated with Credit Numbers as Civil Servants Based on Electric Word Browser (Web) (SISNIBI NANGKET)

“…This is explained in the research of Chinyere's research (2021) [4] which states that work experience, training, education level, and incentives have a positive effect on the effectiveness of using information systems. In line with Shirmohammadi's research (2022) and Christophe Pascal (2021) [13,5], it shows that the level of education has a positive and signi cant effect on the performance of individual users of accounting information systems. This means that the higher a person's education level, the better the individual performance of information system users.…”

“…rank and regular reporting for 1 year [3,[16][17][18] One of the requirements for promotion is the preparation of a List of Proposed Credit Score Determination (Daftar Usulan Penetapan Angka Kredit/DUPAK) and Credit Score Determination (Penetapan Angka Kredit/PAK) conducted every semester, which in one year there are two semesters (January-June and July-December) [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Obstacles faced in recording and reporting credit scores by Midwifes, including non-standardized formats and large workloads, so far the recording of credit scores is still using Microsoft Excel and the drawback of this recording system is that it does not have a data base, thus allowing data from each employee not to be recorded stored [11][12][13][14][15]. Therefore, this research tries to design a midwifery documentation system in the form of SOAP which is integrated with recording and calculating midwife credit scores.…”

Effectiveness of e-learning to promote oral health education: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Subsequently, 221 abstracts and full-text articles were assessed by the first exclusion criteria. Eventually, the review yielded 19 publications [17,21,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] in qualitative synthesis (Table 1), and 9 [21,33,35,36,39,42,44,46,47] in quantitative synthesis by the second exclusion criteria. Table 1 indicated the characteristics of collected studies in qualitative synthesis.…”

“…Plaque Index (PI) and modified PI implemented in Silness and Löe’s studies [ 49 , 50 ] was used in 3 experiments. [ 33 , 39 , 44 ] An emphasis of this PI was to assess the thickness of the biofilm at the gingival area. [ 51 ] This PI scale ranged from 0 to 3 and the modified PI scale from 0 to 2; 0 for no biofilm, 1 for adhering to the biofilm on the gingival margin area of the tooth surface, 2 for the medium soft accumulation that can be seen directly on the gingival margin area of the tooth surface, and 3 for a large amount of soft accumulation on the gingival margin area of the tooth surface.…”

“…Similar to our results, some reports have shown that e-learning education increased adults oral health practice scores in randomized controlled trials to date. [35,[44][45][46]48] Since oral health affects and is closely related to systemic health, [61] improving oral health with e-learning may also contribute to general health. In addition, several studies have indicated that e-learning has positively promoted healthy living, such as improving obesity or physical inactivity and inhibiting smoking.…”