PositivelyPregnant: Using guided prompts in a stress-management app for pregnant women

Abstract

This paper reports on our interdisciplinary research on stress management for pregnant women. We developed a mobile app-PositivelyPregnantfor supporting the mental wellbeing of pregnant women in New Zealand. The app aims to support women in using the time during pregnancy to build resilience and plan a healthy future for the whole family. We report the results from a study using PositivelyPregnant, carried out at 24 weeks gestation with 88 women. We particularly explored the use of prompts for continued engagement.

Mobile well-being in pregnancy: suggestions from a quasi-experimental controlled study

“…The importance of psychological well-being in pregnancy is well known: psychological well-being positively influences not only the course of pregnancy and childbirth, but also the postpartum period and mother-child attachment. 11,14,39 Digital interventions may facilitate stress management also for pregnant women and may promote psychological wellbeing 40 : these media are not simply sources of information, they also operate as performative devices in that they push users to act on and through their bodies via these devices 41 . Mobile apps represent a suitable tool to enact an interactive and customized experience according to the users' goals and they are more effective in promoting change in behaviour than static self-help tools.…”