Healthy Together: an innovative IT-solution for a healthy lifestyle postpartum

Many new mothers feel that they do not know what they should or should not do with regards to physical exercise. Many of them forget to eat healthy and prioritese the needs of the baby at the expense of their own. In addition, many new mothers have unrealistic expectations for how quickly they can loose weight after childbirth.

AIM

This PhD project aspired to help new mothers live a healthy life and to control their weight after pregnancy and birth. By losing the weight in a healthy way, the mothers should be able to reduce the scale of obesity later in life and the inconveniences and risks that it entails – including type 2 diabetes. At the same time, it should give women who become pregnant again fewer complications.

Inspired by participatory design, the PhD project involved both users and developers in designing a solution. The effect would be measured by a randomised controlled study among 120 first-time mothers.

RESULTS

Mothers need tools that support them in understanding their health-related risks and motivate them to plan and take care of their health. These tools should allow access to high-quality information from health care professionals, and access to information should be flexible and given at the right time and in the right way.

To accommodate this, the project developed the module Healthy Together in the app My Hospital. The module contains weekly push-notifications, podcasts and exercise videos, and it is a potentially feasible tool to assist women in improving their lifestyle postpartum.

The project was a PhD project by Pernille Kjærgaard Christiansen.