Mobile Phone Short Messages to Improve Breastfeeding Feeding Practices: A Study Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial in Yangon, Myanmar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Myanmar has a high burden of mortality for children aged younger than 5 years in which undernutrition plays a major role. Despite current efforts, the exclusive breastfeeding rate for children under 6 months is only 24%. To date there have been no interventions using mobile phones to improve breastfeeding and other feeding practices in Myanmar. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to implement a breastfeeding promotion intervention using mobile phone text messages in Yangon, Myanmar, and evaluate its impact on breastfeeding practices. METHODS: M528 is a 2-group parallel-arm randomized controlled trial with 9 months follow-up from recruitment until 6 months post-delivery. A total of 353 pregnant women between 28 and 34 weeks' gestation who had access to a mobile phone and were able to read and write have been recruited from the Central Women's Hospital, Yangon, and allocated randomly to an intervention or control group in a 1:1 ratio. The intervention group received breastfeeding promotional SMS messages 3 times a week while the control group received maternal and child health care messages (excluding breastfeeding-related messages) once a week. The SMS messages were tailored for the women's stage of gestation or the child's age. A formative qualitative study was conducted prior to the trial to inform the study design and text message content. We hypothesize that the exclusive breastfeeding rate in the intervention group will be double that in the control group. The primary outcome is exclusive breastfeeding from birth to 6 months and secondary outcomes are median durations of exclusive breastfeeding and other infant feeding practices. Both primary and secondary outcomes were assessed by monthly phone calls at 1 to 6 months postdelivery in both groups. Participants' delivery status was tracked through text messages, phone calls, and hospital records, and delivery characteristics were assessed 1 month after delivery. Child morbidity and breastfeeding self-efficacy scores were assessed at 1, 3, and 5 months postdelivery. Social desirability was measured at 5 months, and text messages expressing delivery success and user experience were assessed at the end of the study. RESULTS: The targeted 353 pregnant women were recruited between January and March 2015. Baseline data have been collected; SMS messages have been developed and pretested and sent to the women from both groups. Follow-up data collection via phone calls has been completed. Data analysis is being done and results are expected soon. This is the first RCT study examining the effects of mobile text messaging for promoting exclusive breastfeeding. CONCLUSIONS: This trial is timely in Myanmar following the telecommunications market opening in 2014. Our results will help determine whether text messaging is an effective and feasible method for promoting appropriate feeding practices and will inform further research to assess how this model could be replicated in the broader community. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry ACTRN12615000063516; https://anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=367704 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/ 6rGif3l81).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".