'Stakeholders' involvement in the co-design and development of e-Perinatal mHealth app to prevent perinatal mental health disorders in maternal health care: Study Protocol

Abstract

Stakeholders’ involvement in the co-design and development of e-Perinatal, a mHealth app to prevent perinatal mental health disorders in maternal health care: Study Protocol. Background: This study aims to co-design and develop, together with the involvement of the stakeholders, an innovative personalized mHealth app called e-Perinatal for psychological intervention to prevent perinatal mental health disorders (depression and anxiety) in maternal health care and to be implemented in normal routine practice. This project is frame in a European funded project (ERC grant). The co-design will contribute to the implementation process, through the evaluation of specific app contents and the potential participant´s barriers and enablers. Therefore, these findings will contribute to cover a scientific gap in evidence-based practice. Methods: It will be employed an iterative mixed-methods design to co-design, produce, and test a prototype of the e-Perinatal app, according to stakeholders’ preferences. We will follow these three phases: 1) A prototype of the e-Perinatal app (beta version) will be designed with a healthcare software development company. 2) The prototype will be refined via a co-design process, by focus groups, with 144 local stakeholders. 3) Usability testing will be undertaken with 8 pregnant/postpartum women and 8 fathers/partners from phase 2. Qualitative data will be examined by framework analysis and quantitative data from usability testing by simple descriptive statistics and tests of differences, both will be triangulated. Results: The analysis of the co-design process are expected to improve the scientific knowledge related to the implementation of new technologies in primary healthcare settings and, identify the determinants of practice (i.e., barriers and facilitators), to guide the process of implementation of the mHealth ʻe-perinatalʼ in routine practice as a normalized practice and improve the feasibility and effectiveness. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge, the e-Perinatal study will be the first to examine the implementation process of a mHealth app to prevent perinatal mental health disorders in healthcare settings and to evaluate the implementation process in normal routine practice.