JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite thousands of health apps available worldwide, when considering on those addressing children’s first 1000 days of life most of them fail to consider the continuity between prenatal or postnatal stages and their joint impact on maternal and child health. Their reliability, quality and effectiveness are largely unknown as well as the provided contents seem questionable in terms of completeness, updating and trustworthiness.

Objective:

This review evaluates available Italian pregnancy and postnatal care apps, to highlight the main gaps to be overcome and the resulting future challenges to be met in this m-health-related field.

Methods:

A systematic review was conducted on iOS and Android stores and basic information set was collected for all resulting apps. After de-duplication and further selection based on inclusion/exclusion criteria, an in-depth analysis of each was performed by two researchers independently. A 71-items with six domains questionnaire about apps desirable features was used to assess information, functionalities, and technical features while MARS was employed for app quality evaluation.

Results:

From initial 684 apps, 22 of them were deeply analyzed. Most apps did not fulfill the expectations, as just one of them achieved the 50% of all desirable aspects. Postnatal care and counselling for both mother and child was the least accomplished domain. Moreover, the quality of apps information was generally rated more negatively than quality of their functionality and aesthetics features. Particularly lacking aspects include information about methods for postpartum family planning and birth spacing (4.5%) and immunizations (9.1%).

Conclusions:

The identified gaps could serve as a basis for designing and implementing increasingly high-quality, targeted, and effective apps for pregnancy and postnatal health care, that provide comprehensive, reliable, and evidence-based information as well as appropriate aesthetic and functional characteristics, with relevant implications in terms of maternal and newborn health prevention and promotion.