Information, sharing and support in pregnancy: addressing needs for mHealth design

Early pregnancy education and social support is crucial for women, in order to enable them to achieve a healthy pregnancy weight. Opportunities exist for mobile health support applications (mHealth) to aid in pregnancy health management. We present preliminary results of our study of lower-income pregnant American women, in order to understand the design need and challenges for potential mHealth interventions for pregnancy. We find that existing apps ignore the crucial role of the spouse, overstate the need for social sharing with strangers and fail to provide targeted and individualized information about early pregnancy.