Hello, my name is Ishika Kohli, and I'm a second year medical student at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine. Today's presentation focuses on the formative development sleep goals, our goal-focused online access to lifestyle support intervention, and internet-assisted sleep, diet, and physical activity intervention for postpartum patients. Previous sources state that postpartum weight management is important in preventing cardiometabolic disease development in postpartum women, but lifestyle interventions for diet and physical activity are only modestly effective. Sleep disturbances are ubiquitous in postpartum populations and can reduce the adherence to and effectiveness of diet and physical activity interventions. Therefore, interventions that address sleep, diet, and physical activity together could have synergistic effects. Developing such an intervention requires us to learn from postpartum individuals what they would want to see in an intervention to increase its feasibility and acceptability. The study aims to develop a sleep, diet, and physical activity intervention that meets the needs of postpartum people by obtaining their thoughts on the intervention content that they would find most helpful. Our study follows the osteopathic philosophy by focusing on behavioral interventions to prevent chronic disease in postpartum people. We conducted 30-60 minute interviews with people from Allegheny County who gave birth in the past year. Before the interview, participants completed a survey to identify which health behavior – sleep, diet, or physical activity – was the least and most difficult to change and what content they felt would be most important to include in an intervention. We used the responses from the survey to develop the interview guide. We then used content analysis to identify patterns and themes in participant responses. In total, 20 postpartum individuals were interviewed with the median age of participants being about 33 years old and their child's median age being about 6 months old. 14 participants identified as white, 6 identified as black, 2 identified as Hispanic, and 1 identified as other racial identity. We identified four key themes, which are summarized in Table 1. Participants primarily described a need to learn strategies to sleep better and more support to make diet and physical activity changes. They also gave general ideas on how to support the user-friendly platform for the intervention. Many believed that sleep disturbances impacted their ability to manage other aspects of their life including eating healthy or exercising. For example, a mother with a 6-month-old stated, I know that a lack of sleep can make it harder to lose weight and be physically active. It's easy to say, well just sleep more. But if your baby doesn't sleep more, there's not much you can do besides either your spouse gets up or you have a night nurse or something. There are only so many solutions for that problem. In contrast, for diet and exercise, they reported needing support to hold them accountable. A mother with a 5-month-old noted, If I say I'm going to do this exercise today, it's harder for me to hold myself accountable for it. But if I do it with someone or know that I'm going to be discussing with someone else type of thing, then I will make it more of a priority. In summary, participant feedback was very beneficial in helping us create Sleep Goals, an internet-assisted intervention. Figure 1 shows that Sleep Goals supports postpartum people by providing strategies to address sleep disturbances and monitor sleep, diet, and physical activity behaviors. We are currently pilot testing Sleep Goals to assess its feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy to promote weight loss and health behavior changes. Thank you so much for your time. I have mine and my mentor's contact information up there. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Thank you again.

postpartum women

Sleep Goals

sleep management

health intervention

behavioral change