Caremother: integrating smart assistance into prenatal care for improved maternal health outcomes

Continuous monitoring during pregnancy is very much necessary to safeguard the mother and child’s health. In the underdeveloped countries, proper medical systems and health care services are not always accessible during pregnancy. Death of newborn infants’ and the mothers’ results from a lack of continuous monitoring of the health indicators of pregnant women. Remote monitoring aids in helping the expectant mother and health care professionals detect any early-stage concerns involving the mother or unborn child. Therefore, this research aims to identify prenatal care requirements, develop an assistive system for providing effective maternal health services, and evaluate its performance and feasibility. To attain these objectives, a requirement elicitation study was conducted with 23 participants adapting a semi-structured interview approach. As outcomes, this study revealed a set of functional and non-functional requirements. Based on the revealed requirements an innovative assistive system ‘Caremother’ comprising a smart band along with a mobile application to continuously monitor blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and track movement, sleep rate of pregnant women and analyze these data and adjust them accordingly. Finally, the developed system was evaluated with 24 participants including pregnant women, doctors, and nurses, and found that the system is quite effective and efficient end users.