mLabour: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Partograph and Labor Ward Management Application

This work describes the design and preliminary evaluation of mLabour, a mobile application that aims to reduce death and injury in childbirth. mLabour incorporates a digital partograph and workflows to support labor ward management. This digital application reduces some of the barriers that prevent the partograph, a paper tool that has been shown to improve labor outcomes, from being fully utilized. We discuss design tradeoffs made during implementation, largely driven by prototype testing with labor ward nurses. We then discuss the results of a preliminary study of the application's usage, which suggests that mLabour has promise as a tool to improve patient care.