Two Happy Hearts is a program to promote and maintain physical and emotional well-being for the pregnant woman and her baby through technology, health education, social support, and access to community services.
Our Mission
Overview
Maternal care (MC) aims to improve the overall health and welfare of an unborn child, pregnant woman, and the entire family. Contemporary nursing models for MC emphasize the role of self-management through improved health education and access to community resources. Underserved communities with low socioeconomic status (SES) may not receive satisfactory MC or receive delayed and infrequent care, resulting in poor birth outcomes and a decline in overall health. A unique integrated home visitation and group health education approach developed by the non-profit agency MOMS Orange County has provided prenatal and postnatal services to over 3,800 at-risk pregnant women and families in underserved (predominantly low-income Hispanic) communities. This project presents UNITE, a community engagement model for MC that is smart (deploying ubiquitous monitoring and life-logging), connected (bringing together a diverse cast of community members including mothers, families, care providers, and outreach resources) and coordinated (using technology to proactively reach out to the community and use personalized intervention and education for improved self-management by the women). The UNITE model is designed to be scalable, portable across diverse communities, and brings together a multi-disciplinary partnership of researchers (in computing, nursing, medicine, education, and social sciences) together with non-profit agencies (e.g., MOMS OC), hospitals (UCI Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital) and local support organizations (e.g., Community Health Initiative of OC). The project will engage in a controlled study using a community of underserved Orange County mothers to evaluate the efficacy of this new community-enhanced MC self-management approach, and the impact on community building.
Our Model
Our proposed UNITE model deploys technology-enhanced community care coordination and education, coupled with a human-in-the- loop monitoring-intervention system for underserved pregnant women to overcome the previously described gaps. The blue shaded components in the figure below represents the existing HV care coordination and education approach. The UNITE model builds upon and enhances the existing approach by bringing connectivity and smartness to: reach out to underserved communities; provide valuable personalized information for clinicians and paraprofessionals to better support clients and tailor needs; and combine fine-grained and personalized information together with monitoring/intervention and community outreach/education to promote healthier lifestyle for pregnant mothers through self-management. The lightly shaded loop in the figure depicts the overall feedback loop coupling technology-enhanced community care coordination and education, human-in-the-loop monitoring and intervention, and community-reinforced self-management to promote healthier lifestyles for pregnant mothers. The UNITE approach leverages emerging technologies such as Wearable Internet-of-Things (WIoT), community-enhanced learning and recommendation, big data analytics, context recognition, life-logging, and social media, as well as a multi-disciplinary partnership to bring connectivity and smartness to the existing HV care coordination MC models.
Our Personalized Monitoring and Recommendation System
