WhisperMom

Inspiration

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research, African American women are three to four times more likely to have pregnancy-related deaths compared to white women. One of the factors that play role in this data is African American women have less health information and get treated differently on maternal ward. Thus, the community fell less trust towards the healthcare system.

I'm inspired to increase the trust by having a community app, especially for African American women, so they can share their motherhood story among each other, get health information, social support, and share information and ratings on maternal wards facilities. I hope by having more information and better treatment in community recommended maternal ward the overall trust towards healthcare system can increase, mother will be more understanding and willing to follow advice, and results in less maternal mortality in US.

What it does

I was inspired by a chat app that can works like snapchat for pregnant women. The app will allows new mom to join with anonymous account. Then they will be able to post their current maternal status or problem on the app. Instead of personal chat each person will have fleeting message like snapchat. This way the information on the community is private and the issues handled will be more timely. The second feature is having a ratings for maternal wards depending on the community experience. This rating will be more of a suggestion on a group rather than business rating like in google maps. The goal is not to have flame war like Yelp, but more of sharing experience in African American mother's community. 
The third features is having a to do task. We found out that mom-to-be needs to count contraction and has so much more new things to do. This tracker app can hopefully reduce the burden and stress for moms to prepare for the pregnancy and labors.

How we built it

We build it using Pusher as our way to communicate between client The web is developed using NodeJS and HTML,CSS,JS
The application is deployed to Heroku

Challenges we ran into

The deployment to Heroku isn’t as easy because I forgot about the details

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. Creating a real time status update for moms
2. Having a rating system for the maternity ward
3. Create a todo task tracker

What we learned

1. During research I just found out that for pregnancy rate of African American maternity mortality is almost 4x which is quite shocking
2. The app we designed tried to have a sense of community to increase trust in user, however we learned that if we limit our app to only certain community we might miss information from other community, so the design of the app becomes more general
3. The ephemeral account might not be directly private, but hopefully would be better than using other app where the company sell the users health data

What's next for WhisperMom

The next thing is to make sure that the app is built with scalable structures that allows a lot of users and creating a separate groups. Another interesting features is to add auto geo tagging so that the mom can whisper to other mom in proximity to help get more relevant information. By having this improvement the exchange of information might be more personalized and trustworthy

Built With

• css
• heroku
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• pusher