Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 3, 2020
Date Accepted: Nov 27, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Landscape Review of Maternal mHealth in Developing Countries-What can we Learn From mHealth Implementations in Kenya?
ABSTRACT
Background:
The growth of mobile technology in developing countries, coupled with the pressing maternal healthcare challenges has led to wide implementation of maternal mHealth innovations. However, reviews generating insights from implementations incorporating those from grey sources are few.
Objective:
We seek to review maternal mHealth implementations in Kenya with the aim of shedding light on the status of mHealth in developing countries.
Methods:
Using a systematic approach guided by a search strategy, a total of 1,085 citations were retrieved from both peer reviewed and grey sources. Citations were screened guided by an inclusion/exclusion criterion, and the results synthesized by categorizing and characterizing the implementations. The literature search was conducted between January and April 2019.
Results:
From a total of 16 citations comprising 17 maternal mHealth implementations, 59% were in maternal education and behaviour change communication while 24% were applied in health worker decision support. Though 65% of the implementations had some evidence of scholarly work to determine effectiveness, 27% of these were study protocols. Qualitative studies examining how mHealth is accessed and used were few and a large majority (76%) of interventions showed no evidence of theory to support their studies.
Conclusions:
The study highlights the need for more rigour in generating empirical evidence as well as qualitative studies to complement randomized controlled trials.
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