Evaluating the Feasibility and Acceptability of Mhealth for Head Start Parents to Reduce Chronic Diseases and Health Disparities

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: Eliminating health disparities, improving cardiovascular health, increasing physical activity, and decreasing obesity are all among our nation’s key health objectives as proposed by Healthy People 2020. Also among these objectives is to increase the proportion of persons who use mobile devices for health information. Despite these important objectives, recommendations are lacking for interventions utilizing mobile health (mHealth) to improve health outcomes in minority and low income populations. The overall objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability (perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) of mHealth for the parents of Head Start children in south Mississippi.  Head Start is dedicated to providing a comprehensive, culturally sensitive early childhood development program for low income children and families. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) guided this project. TAM states that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use forms an end-user’s beliefs of a technology and therefore predicts attitude toward the technology, which in turn predicts its acceptance. 

Methods: Surveys were sent home to parent in each child’s weekly folder. Parents completed the self-administered survey and returned the surveys in a sealed envelope. To understand the study population, the socio-demographic and health-related variables were described, and to determine the relationships between health-related variables and mHealth variables, chi-square tests and comparison tests were conducted.  

Results: Approximately 75 % of the respondents own and use smartphones with Internet (n = 113, 74.8 %) and 44.4 % (n=67) of the respondents are willing to use mHealth. In addition, the respondents are mostly comfortable with using mHealth, the average score of being comfortable is 8.69 (SD = 2.62). Also, we found that participants who own and use smartphones with Internet regularly have less BMI (mean difference = 5.84, SE = 1.93, p = .003); participants who used mHealth are almost 50 % less likely to have health problems; participants who own and use smartphones with Internet regularly have one point less healthy diet habit (mean difference = 0.89, SE = 0.43, p = .042); and participants who have ever used smartphone for health or medical information have more physical activity score (mean difference = 1.56, SE = 0.53, p = .003). When looking at physical activity, not many participants have used these applications (6 % and 10% of the participants are using any fitness trackers and apps to track physical activity respectively). 

Conclusions: Head Start parents are already using mobile devices and are comfortable with this use. However, many parents are not using mHealth to improve health outcomes. We found that many of the parents were interested in utilizing mHealth; therefore it is concluded that mHealth would be feasible and acceptable for this population. 

Implications for research and/or practice:  Given the positive results of many mHealth studies and the increasing uptake of mobile technologies it is likely that mHealth may improve existing health interventions and also lead to new health interventions because it has the potential to be an important tool to reduce health disparities in this and similar populations.