Designing Maternal Health Apps for the African Context

Africa continues to have the world's highest maternal mortality rate. Two of the priority interventions recommended by experts are to improve maternal knowledge of obstetric danger signs and to improve healthcare workers' ability to diagnose obstetric complications. Smartphone apps can play an important role in providing education, skills training, and symptoms tracking for faster diagnosis. However, there is limited research on what content and features should be prioritized in such apps. The students working on this project will be conduct a literature review on information needs of the target population and on the quality and usability of existing maternal health apps. The student will then develop and validate low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes of various application concepts for the African context and validate these with the target population groups.