A stroke prevention digital platform (Love Your Brain)

An estimated 1 in 4 Australians will experience a stroke in their lifetime. There is a high prevalence of risk factors for stroke in Australia, and a strong need for information about stroke prevention in the community. Increasing public awareness of the risk factors and signs of stroke has been identified by stakeholders as a public health priority. Therefore, there is an urgent need for effective community-based strategies to help people identify and manage their stroke risk factors to reduce the prevalence of this disease that costs the Australian economy 6.2 billion per year. Growing evidence from systematic reviews of the literature supports the use of digital health interventions for managing risk factors, but there is currently no platform specifically dedicated to the prevention of stroke in the community. In this application, we propose a novel integrated digital health platform, “Love Your Brain”, that will be co-designed and evaluated to test its effectiveness. Our multicomponent digital health platform will comprise an online structured health education program and, a text messaging system for short goal-directed messages, on risk factor management. We will conduct a three-arm RCT with 2100 participants to evaluate the effectiveness of the platform for improving visits to general practitioners for risk factor assessment, knowledge of risk factors for stroke, and uptake of healthy behaviours (e.g. medication adherence). This platform will leverage the existing Stroke Foundation prevention program (StrokeSafe) aimed at reducing stroke prevalence in Australia. We hypothesise that participants will be empowered to see their general practitioner(s) for support on management of risk factors, and this will in turn increase their knowledge of risk factors and uptake of healthy behaviours. We will also provide complementary evidence from process and cost-effectiveness evaluations to support replication, upscale, or priority setting decisions in other settings.