Evaluation of Parents’ Use of a Child Health Care Information App and Their Health Literacy: Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Recently, digital media, including internet websites and smartphone apps, have become popular resources for parents in searching for child health care information. Higher health literacy among parents in obtaining adequate health care information and making proper decisions may lead to improved child health outcomes and a reduction in the burden on health care professionals. However, few studies have examined the association between the provision of child health care information apps and parents' health literacy. Objective: This study aims to evaluate whether parents' use of an app that provides child health care information is associated with their health care knowledge, their health literacy, and emergency room visits for their children. Methods: Participants were recruited during checkups for their 1.5-year-old children at health centers within Saku City in 2022. Parents who agreed to participate were included in this study; individuals were excluded if they were not the mother or father of the child or did not have a smartphone. Participants were asked if they had used the Oshiete-Doctor app, which was distributed by Saku City free of charge to improve the home nursing skills of parents and guardians. Sociodemographic data of parents and children, data on health care knowledge about children, data on the frequency of emergency room visits in the past 6 months, and health literacy scores (HLSs) of parents (measured with the HLS-EU-Q47 [European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire]) were collected from participants in this cross-sectional survey. Univariable and multivariable analyses were conducted to examine the associations of app use with health care knowledge, health literacy, and emergency room visits. Results: In total, 251 respondents completed the survey (response rate: 251/267, 94%). Although the proportion of health care workers was significantly higher among app users than among non-app users (P=.005), no other participant attributes were significantly associated with the use of the app. The proportions of participants with higher health care knowledge and participants with higher total HLSs were significantly higher among app users than among non-app users (P=.001 and P=.003, respectively). After adjusting for potentially confounding covariates, these proportions were still significantly higher among app users than among non-app users (P=.02 and P=.007, respectively). Emergency room visits were significantly more frequent among app users than among non-app users (P=.007) in the univariable analysis, but the association was not significant (P=.07) after adjusting for sociodemographic variables. Conclusions: This study showed a significant association between parents' use of a child health care information app and higher child health care knowledge and health literacy. The use of the app may lead to more appropriate health decisions and behaviors in children's health care. Future studies are needed to evaluate the association between app use and emergency room visits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".