Design and Development of a Mobile Application Supporting Planning for Future Parents

Life is changing after recognizing a pregnancy. Then the future parents, who are often healthy individuals, need to change their lifestyles, meet different healthcare institutions, follow new rules, and reschedule their everyday activities. This paper illustrates the design and development of a novel mobile application supporting future parents in planning their activities after recognizing the pregnancy. The focus is on identifying and sharing relevant data between future-parents, healthcare institutions, and the supporting social groups. First, the design and development of the application are sketched, and then we present early evaluation results with major stakeholders: future parents and responsible actors from healthcare institutions, based on data from interviews. The results contribute to increased understanding of developing mobile applications for future parents, considering temporal, situation dependent needs during the pregnancy process, but also after having given birth. To handle temporal and longer-term needs, and provide contextualized information, considering patient-pathways are beneficial.