Perinatal mental health (PMH) problems, particularly anxiety, depression and fear of childbirth (FOC), affect expectant mothers, families, and societies worldwide in devastating ways, through pregnancy and birth complications, issues with mother-infant bonding, and declining birth rate, to name but a few. Sadly, these problems go often undiagnosed and untreated.
The Daring Birth (DaBi) project addresses the grave need for improved PMH care by prototyping and testing a Digital Therapeutics (DTx) for PMH, i.e. the DaBi solution, which is also expected to serve as a novel digital biomarker for PMH. DaBi solution builds on the research of digital emotion tracking, a scientific affect measurement and self-reporting approach developed at Aalto University. Emotion tracking is essential in treating PMH issues because it enables users to enhance their level of understanding about themselves, a key to emotional awareness and regulation. Emotion tracking is combined with user engaging elements and clinically relevant exercises, and we will study the impact of the DaBi solution on patient-reported PMH outcomes and estimate the cost-reduction potential.
The Finnish perinatal care system is the highest ranked globally and offers a unique opportunity for such research, to support our commercialization goals for the European and US markets.
