Feasibility of a Touch Screen Computer Based Breast-feeding Educational Support Program

Breastfeeding has many positive and long lasting impacts on the health of infants and mothers. The investigators propose to develop a bilingual touch screen computer based breastfeeding educational support program to promote breastfeeding among Hispanic rural women living in Scottsbluff area of rural Nebraska. An interactive, tailored, touch screen, bilingual breastfeeding educational program will be developed to deliver breastfeeding education to enhance partial or exclusive breastfeeding. An experimental two-group repeated measures design will be utilized. Ninety four prenatal Hispanic rural women aged 15 years and above will be enrolled and randomly assigned to either the intervention (computer based program, N=47) or attention control (printed educational material, N=47) groups at the Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff. Information gathered will include socio-demographics, familiarity with use of technology and health literacy assessment. Process variables measured will include breast-feeding knowledge and breast-feeding self-efficacy. Primary and secondary outcomes include breast-feeding duration in binary categories (partial or exclusive) and number of sick baby medical visits and months of illnesses. All assessments will be done at baseline, days 3 and 7, weeks 2 and 6 and months 3 and 6 in both the intervention and attention intervention groups. The current proposed study may help advance our understanding to use health information technology as a medium to disseminate bilingual health education programs in rural settings. This exploratory study will lay a foundation for a larger multicenter randomized controlled clinical trial to evaluate the impact of computer based educational intervention to promote sustainability of breastfeeding among women across diverse settings.