@BabySteps: design and evaluation of a system for using twitter for tracking children's developmental milestones

The tracking of developmental milestones in young children is an important public health goal for ensuring early detection and treatment for developmental delay. While numerous paper-based and web-based solutions are available for tracking milestones, many busy parents often forget to enter information on a regular basis. To help address this need, we have developed an interactive system called @BabySteps for allowing parents who use Twitter to track and respond to tweets about developmental milestones using a special hashtag syntax. Parent responses are parsed automatically and written into a central database that can be accessed via the web. We deployed @BabySteps with 14 parents over a 3-week period and found that parents were able to learn how to use the system to track their children's progress, with some using it to communicate with other parents. The study helped to identify a number of ways to improve the approach, including simplifying the hashtag syntax, allowing for private responses via direct messaging, and improving the social component. We provide a discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for the design of interactive public health systems.