A mobile app for treatment of stress urinary incontinence in women has been evaluated in previous studies and has been found to be effective. These studies also showed that the users were predominantly highly educated. The app has been freely available since 2015. The aim in this study was to analyse if there had been any changes in the user profile over time, with a focus on level of education and area of residence, and to compare this with the overall distribution of these factors in the general Swedish population.

All users who downloaded the app from 2015 to 2022 were invited to respond anonymously to a questionnaire with questions about symptoms of urinary incontinence and also background information, such as level of education and area of residence. The data was sent to an encrypted database and the answers could not be traced back to the user. Women aged 18-89 years who lived in Sweden were included. 
The users were categorized by age and year of response. A change was considered significant if there was no overlap in the confidence interval between the different years. The data from the app users was then compared to data for the entire female population of Sweden.

We included 153,215 users from the app for the analyses of level of education and 126,532 users for the analyses of area of residence. The mean age was 37 years. 
The proportion of app users with university education decreased from 63.14% (95% CI 62.16-64.11) to 61.07% (95% CI 60.53-61.61), and the proportion of users with fewer than 7 years of education increased from 0.02% (95% CI 0.006-0.077) to 1.94% (95% CI 1.80-2.10) between 2016 and 2021.
The proportion of app users living in rural areas between 2018 and 2021 showed an increase from 16.90% (95% CI 16.44-17.37) to 20.53% (95% CI 20.08-20.98).

Over time, the proportion of app users in the highest and the lowest educational categories had changed and had become more like the general Swedish population. However, users with a university education were still much over-represented.
The proportion of users living in rural areas had increased and was even larger than for the general Swedish population.

In this large cohort study of users of a mobile app for treatment of urinary incontinence we found that the user profiles, regarding level of education, had changed to become more like the overall Swedish population over a 5-year period.

Continence 12S (2024) 101357
DOI: 10.1016/j.cont.2024.101357