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SAFE / SMART safe sleep text-message video program

Also: Social Media and Risk-reduction Training (SMART) · SAFE trial · SMARTER · GET SMART · TodaysBaby

Research programme led by Rachel Moon and colleagues delivering short safe sleep videos and practice queries by text or email for 60 days after birth, tested against breastfeeding videos; a nursing QI arm (TodaysBaby) trained maternity staff to teach and model safe sleep. Later trials moved delivery to WIC prenatal care (SMARTER), hospital scale-up with QR sign-up (GET SMART) and Facebook groups.

Years
2015–now
Country
United States
Topic
Infant sleep
Asks people to
Substitute
Strategy
Simple instruction
Channel
SMS
Audience
Parents
Mothers of newborns; later low-income WIC participants

Evidence

ExperimentalMixed

SAFE cluster RCT (16 hospitals, 1,263 mothers): videos raised supine sleep (89.1% vs 80.2%), room sharing without bed sharing (82.8% vs 70.4%), no soft bedding (79.4% vs 67.6%) and pacifier use (68.5% vs 59.8%); the nursing QI arm alone had no home effect. Effects worked through attitudes and perceived norms; bedsharing fell without reducing breastfeeding. But SMARTER (2026, 1,383 WIC mothers in 18 states) found no effect on any primary outcome; only prenatal videos raised exclusive supine sleep (70.6% vs 60.9%).

Sponsor (who paid)

  • NIH (NICHD-funded research) Federal government
  • University of Virginia, Boston University Slone Epidemiology Center, Yale and partner universities Academic

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Related campaigns

Sources

  1. Moon RY et al. Effect of nursing QI and mobile health interventions on infant sleep practices: RCT. JAMA 2017 evaluation · 2017 · DOI 10.1001/jama.2017.8982 · PMID 28742913
  2. Moon RY et al. Mediators of improved adherence to infant safe sleep using a mobile health intervention. Pediatrics 2019 evaluation · 2019 · DOI 10.1542/peds.2018-2799 · PMID 31015374
  3. Kellams A et al. Impact of breastfeeding and safe sleep mHealth messaging on breastfeeding and bedsharing. Acad Pediatr 2022 evaluation · 2022 · DOI 10.1016/j.acap.2022.01.016 · PMID 35124281
  4. Kellams A et al. TodaysBaby QI: safe sleep teaching and role modeling in 8 US maternity units. Pediatrics 2017 evaluation · 2017 · DOI 10.1542/peds.2017-1816 · PMID 29030524
  5. Moon RY et al. Safe sleep video intervention via text messaging to low-income families: SMARTER RCT. JAMA 2026 evaluation · 2026 · DOI 10.1001/jama.2026.9119 · PMID 42490082
  6. Moon RY et al. GET SMART cluster RCT protocol. BMC Pediatr 2026 evaluation · 2026 · DOI 10.1186/s12887-026-06715-8 · PMID 41814244
  7. Mobile Reminders Improve Adherence to Infant Safe Sleep Practices reference · 2017 · DOI 10.1056/nejm-jw.na44686

Research notes

Created 2026-10-23 from the sleep campaign literature search (PubMed and web search; OpenAlex was unreachable), see docs/sleep-campaigns-literature.md. Findings are paraphrased from abstracts, not full texts; official URLs come from search results and were not opened. Research program, not a public campaign; include as a message-tested intervention. Registrations NCT01713868 (SAFE) and NCT04387552 (SMARTER). Funding agency inferred from 'Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural' tags. Merged 2026-10-23: a duplicate record (smart-safe-sleep-videos) written in parallel by the OpenAlex sleep search (PR #38) was folded in; 1 sources added from it. Its summary read: "Short safe sleep videos sent to mothers by text message, tested in a series of US randomized trials with low-income families. Mobile reminders improved adherence to back sleeping, room sharing without bed sharing and no soft bedding; a 20-hospital trial now tests how to deliver it."

Record cases/safe-smart-safe-sleep-videos.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign