Telelactation with a Mobile App: User Profile and Most Common Queries

Area of Science:

• Digital Health
• Maternal and Child Health
• Human Lactation

Background:

• Mobile health (mHealth) applications are increasingly utilized for health support.
• Technological advancements have shown positive outcomes in breastfeeding assistance.
• A growing number of breastfeeding applications are available to users.

Purpose of the Study:

• To conduct a descriptive analysis of the LactApp mobile application.
• To identify the user profile and most frequent queries within the application.
• To analyze trends in breastfeeding support queries from 2016 to 2019.

Main Methods:

• A retrospective, comparative, and descriptive ecological time-series study.
• Data collected via Google Analytics and the LactApp application (2016-2019).
• Statistical analysis using Excel and Stata with Prais-Winsten autoregressions.

Main Results:

• 115,830 users and 71,780 infants registered; 1.91% accessed the medical version.
• Top query categories included "baby's sleep" (30.17% of responses), "preservation of milk" (8.91%), "breastfeeding crisis" (6.16%), and "physiological evolution of breastfeeding" (6.15%).
• All analyzed topics showed an increasing trend over the study period.

Conclusions:

• LactApp is a widely adopted and utilized resource for breastfeeding support.
• Key user concerns revolve around infant sleep, milk management, breastfeeding challenges, and developmental stages.
• The study highlights the growing importance and usage of mHealth tools in lactation support.