Pregnancy Apps for Self-Monitoring: Scoping Review of the Most Popular Global Apps Available in Australia

Natasa Lazarevic (), Marie Lecoq, Céline Bœhm and Corinne Caillaud ()
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Natasa Lazarevic: Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health, School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Marie Lecoq: Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health, School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Céline Bœhm: School of Physics, Faculty of Science, Physics Building, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Corinne Caillaud: Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health, School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 2, 1-17

Abstract: Digital health tools, such as apps, have the potential to promote healthy behaviours, especially self-monitoring, which can facilitate pregnancy management and reduce the risk of associated pregnancy health conditions. While pregnancy apps are popular amongst pregnant women, there is limited information about the overall quality of their content or self-monitoring tools and the number of behaviour change techniques (BCTs) that they include. The aim of this study was thus to assess the quality of pregnancy apps for self-monitoring, and their usage of BCTs. We identified pregnancy apps by web scraping the most popular global apps for self-monitoring in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store available in Australia. The app quality was evaluated using the scorecard approach and the inclusion of BCTs was evaluated using the ABACUS tool. We identified 31 pregnancy apps that met our eligibility criteria. We found that pregnancy apps tended to score the highest in the domains of ‘cost and time’, ‘usability’, and ‘technical’, and lowest on ‘clinical’ and ‘end-user requirements’. Additionally, the majority of apps contained minimal BCTs. Based on our findings, we propose a digital health scorecard visualisation that would break down app quality criteria and present them in a more accessible way to clinicians and pregnant users. We conclude that these findings highlight the shortcomings of available commercial pregnancy apps and the utility of a digital health scorecard visualisation that would empower users to make more informed decisions about which apps are the most appropriate for their needs.

Keywords: digital health; pregnancy; smartphone apps; mobile phone; data security; scorecard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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