Pernille Kjærgaard Christiansen

What is the title of your thesis?

Healthy Together - A behavioral change intervention to support a healthy lifestyle postpartum

From which institute and/or research unit did you make your PhD thesis?

Danish Centre for Health Economics, Department of Public Health.

Main Supervisor

Trine Kjær, Professor, PhD, DaCHE, Deaprtment of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark.

What question did you wish to answer with your thesis?

Over the past decades there has been an increase in overweight and obese women of the childbearing age. Overweight and obesity can have a negative impact on the mother’s future health and offspring. The aim of the PhD was to develop an IT-based intervention to support healthy postpartum lifestyle.

What did you find out?

Mothers need tools that support them in understanding their health-related risks and motivate them to plan and take care of their health. These tools should allow access to high-quality information from health care professionals. Access to information should be more flexible and given at the right time and in the right way. To accommodate this, the intervention Healthy Together, which contains weekly push-notifications, podcasts and exercise videos was developed as a module in the app My Hospital. Healthy Together is a potentially feasible tool to assist women in improving their lifestyle postpartum.

How did you do it?

A participatory design approach together and the Behavior Change Wheel were applied.

How can your research be used (in the clinic/society etc.)?

It provides new knowledge on barriers related to a healthy postpartum lifestyle, and how an IT-based intervention can be used to empower the mothers to a healthy lifestyle through the behavioral change intervention Healthy Together that was developed.