Design Opportunities for Persuasive Mobile Apps to Support Maternal and Child Healthcare and Help-seeking Behaviors.

Electronic health (e-health) interventions have been used to provide maternal and child healthcare services in low-middle-income countries of the world. Despite the potential benefits of such healthcare interventions, there have been varying degrees of successes reports in their implementations; the mortality rate before and during childbirth and postpartum is still on the rise in rural Africa. This increase may not be unconnected to some factors that adversely influence women from seeking appropriate maternal and child healthcare services. Moreover, a review of existing e-health interventions uncover that there are no specific operationalizations of relevant persuasive strategies which have the capacity to motivate the adoption of appropriate maternal health-seeking behaviors. Therefore, we advance research in this direction by examining factors that lead to inappropriate maternal health-seeking behaviors amongst expectant and nursing mothers in developing nations. The findings from a large-scale user study of 600 participants from Africa uncover that factors such as cultural practices, religious beliefs, remoteness and inaccessibility and long waiting times at the health facility, ignorance and negative perception, continue to pose a big challenge to maternal and child health care. We reflected on the findings and mapped them to their remedial persuasive strategies while offering socially and culturally-sensitive design guidelines for tailoring Persuasive Mobile Apps to motivate Maternal and Child Healthcare and Help-seeking Behaviors amongst users in the Global South.