Digital monitoring of pregnancy: A case study from Southern Denmark

In Denmark, public health authorities have for some time been developing and promoting both pregnancy apps and parenting apps to support parents or parents-to-be by providing them with easy access to information. Pregnancy apps provide information on typical symptoms and developments at specific stages of pregnancy in addition advice about how to achieve a healthy pregnancy, for instance by following a healthy diet. While the use of apps is generally presented as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of face-to-face-to-face contact with health personnel, such technologies do serve to promote neoliberal ideals of individualism, or of increased individual responsibility for monitoring of health (cf. Gill and Scharff, 2011: 7). A more recent development which is still in its very early stages is the use of an official app, "mit Sygehus" as a platform of communication between pregnant women and the health authorities. The app is used both to register appointments, as a channel of communication from midwifes to pregnant women and as a data bank to which the pregnant women must contribute by entering information on their pregnancies on a regular basis. In the paper, which is based on a pilot study of the implementation of this app in the region of Southern Denmark, I explore how both pregnant women and midwifes experience the increased digitalization of the monitoring of pregnancies. As the pregnant women in Southern Denmark come from different socio-economic backgrounds, an important question concerns how different kinds of digital capital and health capital may facilitate or impede the digital engagement in monitoring pregnancies. Other questions concern how pregnant women experience the obligation to enter information in the app on a regular basis and how they themselves relate to the data bank that is generated? While the data is intended to facilitate the work of midwifes, the generation of data – and the treating oneself as a data -bank – may also (unintentionally) lead to new concerns related to pregnancy and to new kinds of health agency which may or may not be in sync with the health authorities attempts to nudge pregnant women towards specific kinds of health behaviour. The paper will explore how new spaces of health agency as well as new constellations of trust between pregnant women and health personnel are opened in an era of increased digitalization of welfare.