Currently submitted to: JMIR Nursing
Date Submitted: Mar 6, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 19, 2025 - May 14, 2025
(currently open for review and needs more reviewers - can you help?)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
About EMAeHealth: What do women value in a Maternal Education app?. A sequential mixed-method study on user perspective
ABSTRACT
Background:
EHealth can help healthcare service users take a more active role in decision-making and help healthcare professionals guide the patient in this process. Even though usability and health literacy strategies should guide the development of mHealth apps, the number of digital health apps publishing their usability evaluation results is still small
Objective:
The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of users of the EMAeHealth digital app about its acceptance, usability, strengths and weaknesses for its implementation.
Methods:
This is an exploratory sequential mixed-method research study, where a qualitative study was followed by a quantitative study. Qualitative results were collected through individual semi-structured interviews between January and March 2024. Participants were identified through purposive sampling. Saturation was reached once 10 interviews had been carried out. In the quantitative part, 106 out of 400 responded to an anonymous online survey created ad hoc in December 2024 based on the results of the qualitative study.
Results:
Two categories were drawn up during the analysis: (1) “The best thing about this app”, with accessibility, quantity, quality, good organization of the information and the credibility of the source among the reasons for this positive evaluation. (2) “What could be improved”: here, participants considered the app had the potential to become essential if new functions related to healthcare provision were incorporated by linking it to individual health records, as well as making the app more individualized in some different aspects such as receiving notifications. Women commented on the lack of opportunities to share experiences with other women in the same situation and consequently the opportunity to develop networks. The survey gave similar results, with both positive assessments and areas for improvement
Conclusions:
Although women value the accessibility and reliability of an app designed by the public healthcare service positively, areas for improvement were seen, such as the combination of digital intervention with face-to-face care and, above all, the individualization and adaptation of information, notifications or recommendations to the culture, health situation, or stage of each woman
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.