Mobile app designed to help parents of NICU-babies cope
Researchers have designed a smartphone app for parents with very low-birth-weight infants to help them better transition home from the hospital.
Developed by researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the app—called NICU-2-Home—manages infants’ health data, educates the parents on common NICU issues and supports mothers’ and fathers’ mental health.
Craig Garfield, MD, associate professor in pediatrics-hospital based medicine and medical social sciences, and his colleagues had interviewed 25 parents with very low-birth-weight infants to help inform the app’s development, according to a study published in Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing.
They had wanted to determine the parents’ concerns and their coping mechanisms for the period following discharge from the hospital.
“It was really eye-opening to discover what we called in the paper ‘pervasive uncertainty,’ the uncertainty parents describe across nearly all of their abilities to care for their very low birth weight infants at home,” Garfield said in a statement.
His team currently is embarking on a randomized feasibility trial in the NICU to see if the app could have a measureable impact on parenting.
Access the study here.