Promoting Hand Hygiene During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Randomized Controlled Trial of the Optimized Soapp+ App
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The adoption of protective behaviors represents a crucial measure to counter the spread of infectious diseases. The development of effective behavior change techniques therefore emerged as a public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic, but randomized controlled trials (RCTs) testing such interventions during the pandemic were scarce. We conducted a Multiphase Optimization Strategy to develop, optimize, and evaluate a smartphone app, Soapp+, to promote hand hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE: This RCT aims to evaluate the efficacy of the Soapp+ app (intervention group) targeting motivation and habit compared to a simplified version of the app mainly delivering hand hygiene information (active control group). We hypothesize that, compared to the control group, the intervention group will show greater improvements in hand hygiene behavior and behavioral determinants post intervention and at a 6-month follow-up. METHODS: We conducted an RCT from March 2022 to April 2023, recruiting 193 adults living in Switzerland online. Following baseline assessment, the intervention lasted 32 days, followed by a postintervention assessment and a 6-month follow-up. The primary outcome was the change in hand hygiene behavior from pre- to postintervention and preintervention to follow-up. Hand hygiene was assessed with electronic diaries. The intervention group received content incorporating various behavior change techniques designed to address key motivational and volitional determinants of hand hygiene behavior (eg, skills, knowledge, intention, attitudes toward hand hygiene, risk perception, outcome expectancies, self-efficacy, action planning, coping planning, action control, habit). In contrast, the active control group was exposed to behavior change techniques targeting only a subset of these determinants (ie, skills, knowledge, and intention). The delivery of the intervention content was fully automated. Group differences were tested using an intention-to-treat approach with the nonparametric Wilcoxon rank sum test. RESULTS: Of the 193 randomized participants, 146 completed the first hand hygiene diary preintervention and were included in the main analysis. The mean age was 41 (SD 17) years, and 69.2% (n=101) were women. The main analysis revealed significant superiority of the intervention compared to controls in the change in hand hygiene pre-post intervention (W=2034; P<.04; effect size r=0.17) and between preintervention and follow-up (W=2005; P<.03; effect size r=0.18). Regarding behavioral determinants, the change in coping planning pre-post intervention (W=3840; P=.03, effect size r=0.16) was significantly greater in the intervention group using Soapp+ compared to controls. CONCLUSIONS: Soapp+ was developed through a rigorous experimental method during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The RCT provided evidence for the efficacy of Soapp+ to promote hand hygiene in the context of a pandemic. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04830761; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04830761.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".