Body-Area Sensing in Maternity Care: Evaluation of Commercial Wristbands for Pre-birth Stress Management

Abstract

Many women use digital tools during pregnancy and birth. There are many existing mobile applications to measure quantity and length of contractions during early labour, but there is a need to offer evidence-based, credible electronic and digital solutions to parents-to-be. This article presents ongoing research work in a research project regarding mobile telemetric supported maternity care. It summarizes an approach for stress management in late maternity and under birth preparation that is based on body area sensing, our investigation of the properties of commercially available wearable wristbands for body sensing, and the insights gained from testing the wristbands from the project's perspective. We found that sensing precision is very variable depending on the wristband model, while the flows of medical personal data exclusively are routed through vendor cloud platforms outside the EU. The impact of our findings for the use of commercial wristbands in European medical research and practice is discussed in the conclusion.