mHealth for Mother and Child Health Nutrition - A Review and Proposed Design for Indonesia Focus on Early Life Nutrition in Indonesia

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as computer, mobile phone, and internet, are emerged as an accelerator in the health sector development. They can play a critical role in pursuing outcome for most vulnerable groups, such as pregnant woman and children in developing countries. In this paper, we review the use of m-Health to improve mother and child health. We use the result of this review to propose a design for a set of m-Health applications focused on the improvement of mother and child nutrition in Indonesia. Our analysis of existing applications includes both a literature review and an empirical search of publicly available mobile apps from Google Search, Google Play, and Apple Store. From the review, we found that there exist several mobile and or e-Health systems focusing in improving early life nutrition delivery, both state and privately made. In Indonesia specifically, the Minister of Health has launched a mobile app for early life to work in conjunction an established monitoring book of mother and child health “Buku Kesehatan Ibu dan Anak”. However, the download rate of this app remains low. This result produced important information that can be further learned, so we could set and deliver a successful humanitarian technology implementation in improving early life nutrition care in Indonesia.