Emerging Media - RSA Research
This weeks’ entry investigates the pregnancy app market. Although the app will be designed for use in conjunction with medical professionals, it is a good idea to understand what mainstream apps are popular and why. This can aid user participation through familiar user experiences and provide a basis to encourage medical clinics to uptake these types of products through familiarity. Research can also reveal things that were not initially taken into consideration, so an important stage, before development is undertaken. This week considers the mHealth (mobile health) overview with a look into pregnancy apps in the next post.
The mHealth App Market
The mobile health or mHealth app market, which incorporates the use of mobile devices including mobile telecommunications and multimedia to aid better health outcomes amongst its users. Globally there are over 2.7b smartphone users and 1.35b tablet users worldwide with more than 400,000 health related apps available in prominent app stores in 2021 (Buchanan et al., 2021).
Over 50% of Women Use Pregnancy Apps
It is cited that over 50% of women use pregnancy apps and that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the way women received prenatal care (Frid et al., 2021) suggesting mobile apps supplement primary care for information and reassurance. Popular magazines such as Women’s Health – These 11 Pregnancy Apps Will Help You Navigate Expecting (womenshealthmag.com) and Cosmopolitan – Best pregnancy apps: Our pick of pregnancy apps for parents-to-be (cosmopolitan.com) have run articles on the features of pregnancy apps indicating mainstream acceptance of their use.
Medical Concerns
Whilst the addition of any information to pregnant women is desirable, there are concerns about the medical accuracy of mHealth apps. Bert et al., (2016) found a lack of evidence that pregnancy apps were based on reliable medical authority congruent with Magrabi et al., (2019), who found that healthcare apps were difficult to govern. There is a low barrier to entry in the development and building of healthcare apps. Socio-technical disparity therefore provides challenges to formalising development processes and clinical governance. The infographic below indicates some of the issues that the development of health apps encounter.
The next journal post will look at two popular pregnancy apps on Google Play Store.
References
Bert. F, Passi, S. Scaioli, G et al., (2016), There Comes a Baby! What Should I Do? Smartphoes’ Pregnancy Related Applications: A Web Based Overview. Health Informatics, Vol 22 (3), pp. 608-617.
Buchanan, L. Anderson, E. MBiostat, H. X. Phongsavan, P. Rissel, C. Wen, L. M, (2021) Sources of Information and the use of Mobile Applications for health and Parenting Information During Pregnancy: Implications for Health Promotion. Health Informatics Journal, Sagepub.com, pp. 1-10.