. Behnaz Pouriayevali; . Asghar Ehteshami; . Shahnaz Kohan; . Sakineh Saghaeiannejad-Isfahani
Volume 12, Issue 11 , December 2022, , Pages 1-8
Abstract
Self‑care may help prevent pregnancy complications and mortality by informing parents. Mobilehealth applications (apps) can help individuals to improve the quality of self‑care. ...
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Self‑care may help prevent pregnancy complications and mortality by informing parents. Mobilehealth applications (apps) can help individuals to improve the quality of self‑care. Although it hasbeen claimed that mobile apps have various benefits, their functionalities in pregnancy self‑careare still unclear. A clear understanding of current apps can help researchers, practitioners, and appdevelopers to identify appropriate functionalities for new development and future refinement of currentapps. This review endeavored to identify appropriate functions for pregnancy self‑care mobile appsand user interface (UI) features. The scope of this review integrates self‑care for pregnancy appspublished in Google Play and Cafe Bazaar (an Iranian Android marketplace), popular Android appstores, from July to October 2019 by sing the systematic search technique. All 4196 downloaded appswere installed, and it was found that 76 of them met the inclusion criteria. This way, their featureswere extracted and categorized by the conventional content analysis. Three main themes and 69subthemes in terms of apps functionalities and their UI features were extracted as follows: 1) Trainingmaterials (maternal and paternal) with 27 subthemes; 2) self‑care functionalities (consultations, fetustracking, clinical examination, supportive assistance, and reminders) with 26 subthemes; and UIfeatures with 16 subtheme. The findings underlined the mHealth solutions for pregnancy self‑careand the need for development of the apps regarding the extracted functionalities and UI features;however, controlled trials are needed. It is recommended that transparent reporting of mHealthinterventions needs to be prioritized to enable effective interpretation of the extracted data.
