November 7, 2025
Mobile health apps for pregnant women usability and quality rating scales: a systematic review | BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth

In today’s world of technology, electronic devices such as cell phones and tablets have become an essential tool in everyday life. Whether used for formal or personal purposes, these devices influence and shape the way people think and live. The rapid development of Internet-based communication technologies over the past twenty years has changed the lifestyles of people around the world. Residents of cities and rural can equally access the opportunities used by mobile devices [1,2,3].

When it comes to women’s health and addressing important issues such as childbirth and pregnancy, the most important thing is to constantly monitor the health of the mother and fetus [4, 5]. In the past, due to unnecessary considerations due to ignorance, information about pregnancy and childbirth was usually done incompletely and with strange restrictions. Some articles even considered educating and informing people about this natural issue an ugly act [6,7,8] .

But fortunately, over time, extremist views have largely disappeared, so that today there are many tools to inform young women about the important issue of pregnancy and maintaining their health during this critical period [9,10,11,12] .

Today, with the significant advancement of medical technologies in the field of pregnancy and childbirth, the world of applications and websites has entered all aspects of human life, including pregnancy [13,14,15]. These days, it can be rarely seen a pregnant woman who is unaware of health status of her fetus [16]. Therefore, the category of motherhood has been and is a very lucrative and popular subject for launching startups in the world, so that if you look at virtual stores, you can encounter with a considerable variety of apps and websites in the field of motherhood [17,18,19].

Today, the use of apps is more popular than websites. As a result, most reputable sites in the field of pregnancy have designed apps that usually use tools such as estimating the time of delivery, calculating BMI, determining sex, calculating the required calories, scheduling the vaccine, searching for the baby’s name, etc. in this program are included that can be easily used. The “Pregnancy and Childhood Calendar” is also one of the most popular sections of the applications, which provides accurate and complete articles from the first week of pregnancy to the 41st week of pregnancy [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] .

Today, from the topic of pregnancy health and counseling in this field to counseling for buying clothes, designing a room and preparing baby food, it is discussed and progressed in the context of applications. There are also many websites that work in this field and are a kind of app for young mothers [3, 21, 23, 29, 30] .

But because the multiplicity of these apps, choosing the best type has become difficult for pregnant women. The reliability of the software, its accuracy and precision, and finally how to use it is very important. However, the main concern is the quality of these programs. Therefore, there is a need to monitor the quality of information provided by these pregnancy programs. In the development of interactive mobile applications, one of the main factors that determine their success is satisfaction [31]. However, although many researchers have done research on mobile health-related applications, many of these studies are inaccurate.

On the other hand, despite heavy traffic, traveling is a dangerous act for pregnant women, and using the app can reduce their travel to some extent and provide them with the necessary information and measurement.

However, the quality, reliability and effectiveness of existing pregnancy programs have not yet been determined. Therefore, exposure to potentially harmful programs or participation in research with evidence-based mobile applications should be carefully considered, especially during pregnancy when women are more sensitive to external influences. In addition, unnecessary information and advice about lifestyle and health care can cause more anxiety and stress during pregnancy. Therefore, information on usability and effectiveness is very important for implementing new programs in maternal health care [6, 17, 18, 24, 26, 27, 32] .

In this research article, pregnancy apps will be categorized first and then they will be compared in terms of accuracy, precision and usability of the dimensions of Jacob Nielsen’s five principles, it will be given users a detailed view to choose the best type of app.

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