A Health Belief Model Approach to Evaluating Maternal Health Behaviors among Africans - Design Implications for Personalized Persuasive Technologies

Abstract

We investigate the health belief and its impact on maternal health behaviors among African women with a view to offering guidelines for designing personalized persuasive technologies to encourage appropriate maternal health and lifestyles amongst women in the Global South. The results from the analysis of our qualitative data uncover key themes from the interview responses (of 47 stakeholders) associated with our research questions. They are: monitoring of fetus development and ensuring health and wellbeing of expectant mother and unborn baby, inaccessibility of the health facilities and long waiting times (queues) at the health facilities, poverty, perception about Caesarian Session (CS), ignorance of the consequences of inappropriate health behaviors, and low tech skills. Others include traditional and religious beliefs and constant health crises during pregnancies, delivery of newborn babies with serious health problems and deformities; and increase in pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths. Specifically, we uncovered that socio-cultural factors may or may not support appropriate maternal health behaviors. The socio-cultural factors include ethnic practices, traditional beliefs, and religious inclinations of the pregnant mothers and their families. For instance, the belief that “safe delivery is only a function of belief in God”, intake of untested concoctions, and stigmatization due to inability to deliver her baby by herself at home and/or submission to Caesarian Session (CS), are unsupportive religious and traditional beliefs and practices that promote inappropriate maternal health behaviors amongst the people. Subsequently, the themes were categorized based on their associated health belief factors such as perceived benefits, perceived barriers, perceived threat, and socio-cultural factors. We mapped them to their corresponding persuasive design strategies. Finally and based on the outcome of our studies, we propose culturally appropriate guidelines for developing personalized persuasive technologies for maternal health, which will be potentially effective in motivating healthy behaviors and lifestyles amongst expectant and nursing mothers across African communities.