Pregnancy monitoring and mapping using integrated mobile application and geographic information system

Abstract

Pregnancy care is an important task in public health. Birth health and rate ensure the sustainability of a nation and therefore, many countries put highly attention to pregnant woman. Scheduled medical assessment is a common way to monitor the pregnancy risk. This task, however, need the role of doctor or midwife to carry out several physical assessments. Pregnant women have to come to the health service facilities in certain period of time. It is therefore, lead to unmonitored duration between medical check up periods. Currently, smartphone has a number of sensors embedded in most low-cost device. The geo positioning sensors (GPS), accelerometer, camera and video recorder has become standard gadget facilities. In this research we propose a simple method to monitor pregnancy risk by using an application in a smartphone. We provide an integrated mapping to plot the member of the pregnant women under surveillance on the map with their risk status and their real time position. The mobile application automatically records walking activities and position. Pregnant woman can voluntary submit their weight and consumed food to the system. We implement this system in a pilot study to 30 pregnant women and a public health facility in central Java Indonesia. According to our user experience survey to the respondent, the application working but still need improvement in many user interface aspects. According to the recorded data during the implementation, we found that the main function of the mobile application and mapping successfully record the necessary monitoring data.