MatHealth
since 2018
The overall goal of the MatHealth project is to improve maternal health using an enhanced mobile phone-based multimedia application among illiterate women in rural southwestern Uganda. Building on a prototype of a mobile maternal health support technology developed as part of the on-going PhD research by one of our team members, we will redesign the prototype to make it suitable for illiterate populations by engaging the local communities/prospective users to incorporate multimedia components such as videos and audios. Using the enhanced prototype, we will carry out a reasonably large scale field study in Uganda, where we will empirically implement the prototype among the rural community and assess its preliminary impact on maternal health. We hypothesize that implementing the enhanced prototype will result in increased access to high quality, relevant local and culturally acceptable maternal health information that can enable mothers and families demonstrate improved health-seeking and preventative behaviors, including early uptake and adherence to antenatal check-ups and care including HIV testing, good nutrition, birth preparedness, dealing with danger signs, among others; all of which should ultimately contribute to improved maternal and child survival. We will contribute to and benefit from a culture of continuous learning by engaging with the local/user communities, policy makers, and researchers to share lessons learned and best practices. This will potentially facilitate the translation of our research findings into medical care.