Objectives: The Health & Her app provides menopausal women with a means of monitoring their symptoms, symptom triggers and menstrual periods, and enables them to engage in a variety of digital activities designed to promote well-being. This study aimed to examine whether sustained weekly engagement with the app is associated with improvements in menopausal symptoms.
Design: A pre-post longitudinal cohort study.
Setting: Analysed data collected from Health & Her app users.
Participants: 1900 women who provided symptom data via the app across a 2-month period.
Primary and secondary outcome measures: Symptom changes from baseline to 2 months was the outcome measure. A linear mixed effects model explored whether levels of weekly app engagement influenced symptom changes. Secondary analyses explored whether app-usage factors such as total number of days spent logging symptoms, reporting triggers, reporting menstrual periods and using in-app activities were independently predictive of symptom changes from baseline. Covariates included hormone replacement therapy use, hormonal contraceptive use, present comorbidities, age and dietary supplement use.
Results: Findings demonstrated that greater engagement with the Health & Her app for 2 months was associated with greater reductions in symptoms over time. Daily use of in-app activities and logging symptoms and menstrual periods were each independently associated with symptom reductions.
Conclusions: This study demonstrated that greater weekly engagement with the app was associated with greater reductions in symptoms. It is recommended that women be made aware of menopause-specific apps, such as that provided by Health & Her, to support them to manage their symptoms.
Keywords: GYNAECOLOGY; Health informatics; MENTAL HEALTH; Quality of Life; Reproductive medicine; Telemedicine.
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.