Empowering Caregivers Through mHealth: Enhancing Infant Health and Weight Gain Using Participatory Research

This proposal describes a five-year research and career development plan that will prepare Dr. Sump to accomplish her long-term goal of becoming an independent investigator focused on leveraging digital health interventions to improve the health of all children. This proposal is specifically focused on improving the preventive care for infants with and at risk for poor weight gain in the first six months of life—a high priority population for the NICHD. Thousands of infants are hospitalized for poor weight gain every year; yet, as many as 75% have a psychosocial or environmental etiology for their poor weight gain rather than an underlying medical condition. It is imperative that we provide better support and innovative solutions in the outpatient setting in order to prevent hospitalization, which is stressful, expensive, and often avoidable. Using caregiver- engaged research and user-centered design, Dr. Sump’s work leverages previous work on an existing mHealth intervention for infants after they are hospitalized for poor weight gain. This project aims to adapt that intervention into a more comprehensive and acceptable intervention that can be deployed upstream and in the outpatient setting. In Aim 1, Dr. Sump will pursue large group, participatory qualitative methods to understand factors that promote or impede caregiver engagement with mHealth. In Aim 2, she will utilize user-centered design to adapt an existing mHealth intervention to be preventive of hospitalization and relevant to the end- users, incorporating findings from Aim 1. This will include a refinement phase in which iterative n-of-1 testing leads to an intervention that is highly usable. In Aim 3, Dr. Sump will conduct a single arm feasibility study to test the acceptability and feasibility of the adapted mHealth intervention in infants with and at risk for poor weight gain at a pediatric primary care center. To complete this research and to support her transition to an independent investigator, Dr. Sump has several competencies that she will pursue alongside the research: 1) caregiver- and community-engaged research, 2) user-centered design, 3) intervention evaluation and patient centered outcome research, and 4) academic writing and professional development. Dr. Sump has put together an accomplished and multidisciplinary mentorship team with expertise in participatory research, population health, user-centered design, and intervention evaluation with clinical trials. To prepare for a future clinical trial evaluation, Dr. Sump will have key experiential learning under her mentorship team to gain skills in trial design, ethical considerations of clinical trials, and statistical analysis. By accomplishing the aims in this proposal, Dr. Sump will leverage digital health interventions to address key gaps in the management of infants with or at risk for poor weight gain prior to hospitalization. The preliminary data from this research proposal and the skills achieved throughout the career development plan will directly support future R01 applications to expand this work to determine effective interventions for infants with poor weight gain. Project Number: 1K23HD120667-01 | Fiscal Year: 2026 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Courtney Sump | Institution: CINCINNATI CHILDRENS HOSP MED CTR, CINCINNATI, OH | Award Amount: $164,808 | Activity Code: K23 | Study Section: Special Emphasis Panel[ZRG1 CCHI-N (52)] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11280844