SmartMom: Teaching by Texting to Promote Health Behaviours in Pregnancy

Teaching by Texting to Promote Health Behaviours in Pregnancy

The goal of this randomized clinical trial is to evaluate the effectiveness of SmartMom, a text messaging-based mobile health program for prenatal education. The main questions are to determine if healthy pregnant people receiving SmartMom messages that promote health behaviours in pregnancy versus messages that don't provoke behaviour change have improvement in:

1. knowledge about healthy pregnancy and birth
2. standardized measures of depression, anxiety, and fear of childbirth
3. adoption of positive health behaviours in pregnancy
4. maternal, fetal, and newborn outcomes

Participants in the intervention group will receive three evidence-based text messages per week, plus optional supplemental messages on topics relevant to them, throughout pregnancy.

The control group will receive general interest messages on pregnancy-related topics that are not promoting behaviour change.

Inclusion Criteria:

• pregnant person
• at 15 weeks gestation or earlier
• singleton pregnancy
• can read and understand English at grade 8 level and comfortable completing online surveys
• live in Canada (excluding British Columbia where SmartMom has been piloted)

Exclusion Criteria:

• health conditions existing prior to pregnancy that require individualized care (e.g. hypertension, cardiac disease, diabetes)
• previously had a baby with the SmartMom program