Abstract
Background
Within the growing availability of health apps worldwide, apps for pregnancy and postnatal care still raise critical issues. The content they provide might rise some concerns in terms of quality, completeness, as well as practical implications for effective prevention and health promotion. This study aims at evaluating free pregnancy and postnatal care apps available in Italian language, shedding light on the main shortcomings and future challenges in this public health field.
Methods
Between July and November 2020, a multidisciplinary research group conducted a systematic review on iOS and Android stores. Data about information, functionalities and technical features of the apps were collected through a 71-items questionnaire including six domains: pregnancy and postnatal care and counselling, reminders and push notifications, notes and records, social support, and technical features.
Results
From 684 identified apps, 22 were deeply analyzed. Resulting apps did not include most desirable features, with just one achieving the 50% of them. The most lacking domain was postnatal care and counselling (17.3%), with particularly scarce information about immunizations that mothers or newborns need (9.1%). Information about free-of-charge and upon payment clinical exams during pregnancy is also absent in half of the apps. Moreover, most apps did not provide users social support with other mothers nor with the healthcare professionals (95.5%). Finally, just one app was CE marked as a medical device.
Conclusions
The identified gaps highlight large room for improvement in the use of pregnancy and postnatal care apps for prevention and health promotion. More efforts are needed to design and implement increasingly high-quality apps providing information related to preventive or diagnostic medical practices, as well as social and certified mechanism to interact with healthcare staff.
Key messages
Increase in use of pregnancy and postnatal care apps should be considered as an opportunity for public health in terms of prevention and health promotion.
Providing appropriate information as well as social mechanism to interact with healthcare staff could help to direct mothers and mothers-to-be to the most suitable screening and therapeutic paths.
Last updated on: 03/31/2022 - 11:47
