Designing an App for Maternity Care: Improving Communication between Swedish Midwives and Arabic-speaking Women

Abstract

Good communication is essential for good healthcare. In maternity care, inadequate communication
may contribute to poorer outcomes in pregnancy. A large number of Syrian, Arabic-speaking
immigrants arrived in Sweden in 2015-2016. A trans-disciplinary team acted as intermediaries
between midwives and a technical company to develop a Swedish-Arabic communication app for use
in antenatal care. An earlier study describes the creation of the content and the development of the
prototype. This paper describes the next phase of the study, i.e., testing the prototype, refining the
structure and content, and development of the next version. A user-centred approach with a norm
critical perspective was applied. Workshops and observations were performed for interaction between
the midwives and the research group, facilitating development from a user perspective. A final version
of the app was developed. Future plans are to evaluate the app and produce a Swedish-English
version.