Responding to Adolescent Perinatal Depression with Patient-Centered Mobile Health in West Africa

Many factors influence the accessibility of health care facilities by perinatal adolescents. Adolescence has distinct developmental challenges, along with self-stigma (i.e., shame relating to getting pregnant at a young age) and public stigma from health care providers and others in the community that can make accessing these services difficult. Effective, flexible, and convenient-to-access interventions are needed to address the health care needs of pregnant adolescents.

With guidance from Dr. Ben-Zeev, this research will build on previous work to scale up efforts for perinatal depression for adolescents in primary care in Nigeria. Dr. Kola (bio) will lead efforts utilizing user-centered design (UCD) principles to develop a mobile phone application to complement a face-to-face intervention for perinatal adolescents within routine care. Elements from the WHO mhGAP Evidenced-based Guidelines for Management of Perinatal Depression will be also be adapted for this work.

The specific aims of the study are to:

1) Employ User-Centered Design (UCD) to develop and construct an mHealth system for the treatment of adolescent perinatal depression.

2) Conduct usability tests to refine and enhance the mHealth system.

3) Develop a road map to disseminate the mHealth intervention into primary care.

Funded by: supported by the Office Of The Director, National Institutes of Health (OD, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, and Fogarty International Center (FIC).

Grant Number: 1K43TW011046-01A1