JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The promulgation of China's three child policy has increased the demand for scientific and personalized pregnancy health management. The development of mobile health (mhealth) technology has promoted the use of pregnancy management applications among pregnant women.

Objective:

Our study aimed to analyze the satisfaction of pregnant women with pregnancy management applications and explore its influencing factors based on the two-factor theory by mining User Generated Content (UGC).

Methods:

180,107 user reviews of 86 pregnancy management apps in the five major app stores were collected, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and DeepSeek-R1 were used for topic clustering and semantic parsing. Tobit model was used to explore the influencing factors of user satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and KANO model was used to identify basic factors and attractive factors.

Results:

User reviews were clustered into 12 themes and categorized into three main types: technical security support, basic service experience, and maternal and infant scenarios. System login (β=2.829, p<0.001) and privacy disclosure (β=1.955, p<0.001) had a significant impact on dissatisfaction as basic factors. The attractive factors such as doctor inquiries (β=0.356, p<0.001) and growth records (β=0.401, p<0.001) drove the improvement of satisfaction. There was a significant difference in user satisfaction between iOS and Android (60.75% vs. 89.32%), reflecting the differences in demand stratification and technological ecosystems.

Conclusions:

This study systematically analyzed the multi-dimensional structure of the user experience of pregnancy management apps and revealed the progressive service framework of "technical safety support - basic service experience - maternal and infant service scenarios". The research found that there is significant asymmetry in user satisfaction driven by the two-factor theory. The research advocated that suppliers should prioritize strengthening the bottom line of health care such as system stability, and reconstruct the service ecosystem with the functional improvement of the maternal and infant scenarios as the core. Healthcare providers should take advantage of the advancement of mhealth technology to refine pregnancy management, expand the coverage of high-quality medical services, and achieve homogenization and fairness in medical care.