Mothers’ views on mobile health in self-care for pregnancy: A step towards mobile application development

BACKGROUND: Applications for pregnancy self-care (APSC) can improve post-partum by empowering pregnant women's status quo. This study endeavored to identify the operational needs of an application (app) from the perspective of Iranian pregnant women. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In a qualitative manner, semi-structured and face-to-face interviews were conducted using an interview guide. Interviewees were pregnant women who encountered to health facilities of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences for prenatal care and were willing to be interviewed. The interviews were conducted from June 2019 to June 2021. All the recorded interviews were transcribed. The obtained data were analyzed through conventional content analysis using MAXQDA 12 (Developer: VERBI GmbH Release: 2015 Version: 12 OS: Microsoft Windows Type: Qualitative Data Analysis - Offline). Data saturation was obtained after 14 interviews. One of the researchers, as a data encoder, became acquainted with them by immersing himself in the data. After the data was first encoded and summarized, the codes were analyzed. In addition, an attempt was made to reduce the impact of researchers’ experiences at different stages of the study process. RESULTS: Based on the opinions of pregnant women, 7 main themes (nutrition, training, fatal monitoring, relaxation, health, risk factors, physical activity) and 38 sub-themes were identified for APSC development. The findings revealed that pregnant women tend to use APSC, but because they are not comprehensive, women search the Internet to answer some of their information needs. CONCLUSIONS: The findings can be useful in developing a comprehensive pregnancy self-care mobile application that is localized based on the operational needs of pregnant women to make them capable and self-caring in controlling pre-risk situations.