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Pregnancy is a significant but stressful life transition, requiring effort from multiple stakeholders including expectant parents, family members, and friends to navigate. Existing work has primarily focused on understanding and supporting the technology use of pregnant people, neglecting other stakeholders' needs and participation. We therefore consider how pregnancy tracking apps both improve and interfere with the reconfiguration of social relationships caused by pregnancy, drawing on insights from family sociology to examine how these relationships evolve over pregnancy and the transition to parenthood. We reviewed the features of 20 pregnancy tracking apps, and analyzed 4,709 public reviews of them, finding that stakeholders used apps to bond with one another around the excitement of pregnancy, build a prenatal relationship with the fetus, and co-manage pregnancy-related logistical tasks. We find that not accounting for fetal demographics and users' identities, along with socio-cultural norms around gender and parenting roles, often inhibit these collaborative practices. We therefore suggest designing collaborative pregnancy tracking technology that considers both inclusiveness and specificity regarding stakeholders' different roles and relationships to pregnancy.
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Unpacking the Lived Experience of Collaborative Pregnancy Tracking
Pregnancy brings physical, emotional, and economic challenges for expectant parent(s), close relatives, and friends. Existing technology support, including tracking technology, largely targets pregnant people and ignores other stakeholders. We therefore lack an understanding of how to approach designing collaborative pregnancy tracking technology. To understand how people collaborate around pregnancy tracking and wish to do so, we interviewed 13 pregnant people and 11 non-pregnant stakeholders in the U.S., including partners, friends, and grandparents-to-be. We find that people collaborate for goals like social bonding and jointly managing various pregnancy data. Stakeholders collaborated by either dividing up data types or collectively monitoring the same information. We also identify tensions and challenges, such as pregnant people’s privacy concerns and stakeholders’ varied levels of interest in tracking. In light of socio-cultural norms and stakeholders’ distinctive roles around pregnancy, we point to opportunities for designing collaborative technology that aligns with as well as challenges socio-cultural practices around pregnancy tracking.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2237389
- PAR ID:
- 10540808
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400703300
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Honolulu HI USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642652
