Promoting patient empowerment in men and women undergoing fertility treatment through the provision of mobile informational and emotional support
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infertility, the inability to become pregnant after 12 months of regular unprotected sex, affects approximately 16% of Canadian couples and is associated with psychological distress, stigma and feelings such as loneliness, uncertainty and loss of control. Fertility patients may benefit from interventions that foster patient empowerment (PE), which refers to patients’ sense of control over their health and ability to cope with their illness and manage their treatment. Mobile health (mHealth) is the delivery of health care services through communication devices such as smartphones, and may represent an effective approach to deliver empowering interventions through improved access to targeted and suitable information and increased connectivity with peers.The present project involved the testing of an mHealth application (app) Infotility containing practical information on infertility, treatment options and associated psychosocial issues, as well as a forum providing access to peer support. A pre-post study design was used to address the following study objectives: (1) to assess which patient characteristics were related to PE, (2) to examine the relationship between PE, perceived stress and fertility-related quality of life, (3) to explore how PE relates to engagement with the app, and (4) to evaluate whether PE changed during the study and in relation to engagement with the app. Standardized questionnaires assessing PE, perceived stress, fertility-related quality of life and participant characteristics were administered prior to (Time 1) and following (Time 2) app use. A total of 152 participants, including 122 women and 30 men, tested the app for a period of 8 weeks during which time activity on the app was monitored via Google Analytics.Results indicated that being older was associated with greater PE in both women and men. In women, having sought psychological counselling during fertility treatment was related to lower PE. In addition, PE correlated negatively with perceived stress (r = -.549, p < .005) and positively with quality of life (r = .602, p < .005). Women reporting lower PE at Time 1 engaged significantly more with the app as a whole, and particularly the information section while men reporting lower PE at Time 1 engaged significantly more with the app. Even though overall PE scores did not change between Time 1 and 2, engagement with the forum was found to moderate the relationship between stress and change in PE for men (b = 5.876, t = 2.176, p < .05), such that men who reported high stress and who used the forum reported increased PE. The present findings suggest that the Infotility app may be a helpful resource for patients who feel less empowered, especially men who are highly stressed, as it provides tools to better understand infertility, navigate treatment, cope and feel supported
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".