Sarala Ghimire Subedi

• Ghimire Subedi, Sarala; Martinez, Santiago; Hartvigsen, Gunnar & Gerdes, Martin (2023). Augmented Reality enhanced device usage training tool for in-home health-self-monitoring by pregnant women. Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies. ISSN 2510-2591. doi: 10.48340/ihc2023_p015. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Virtual care comprising virtual visits and monitoring via audio or video has the potential to reduce access barriers to care and has been successfully implemented in prenatal care. It reduces the frequency of in-person visits and increases self-care skills. However, the knowledge and competence in handling monitoring equipment at home directly influences satisfaction and engagement with the system and the quality of the information provided to healthcare professionals. Therefore, providing ad-hoc training to end-users would help develop confidence in using devices at home correctly. This paper proposes an augmented reality (AR) application to guide and train pregnant women to use monitoring devices. The aim is to instruct pregnant women to use the monitoring devices and follow the video guidelines for handling them correctly. It validates pregnant women's encouragement and ability to self-care for their pregnancy.

• Ghimire Subedi, Sarala; Martinez, Santiago; Hartvigsen, Gunnar & Gerdes, Martin (2023). Virtual prenatal care: A systematic review of pregnant women's and healthcare professionals' experiences, needs, and preferences for quality care. International Journal of Medical Informatics. ISSN 1386-5056. 170. doi: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2022.104964. Show summary

  Introduction: Exploitation of telehealth in prenatal care has the potential to reduce the access barrier to care and empower women to participate in their own care. This review aims to assess the practical implications of virtual prenatal care and identify the needs and experiences associated with it. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted in four electronic databases: PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane. The keywords used were “pregnancy”, “virtual visit”, “prenatal”, and others. The search included all relevant studies published from 2011 to 2021 written in English. Articles mentioning virtual prenatal care incorporating synchronous communication between pregnant women and health care professionals were included. Those unrelated to prenatal care or employing asynchronous means of virtual care were excluded. The review was structured following the PRISMA guidelines. Different quality appraisal methods such as JBI, CASP, NOS, and Cochrane were used to assess the methodological quality of the literature. The data were then analyzed based on the categorization of the studies. Results: Overall, 2863 articles were identified, of which 19 met the inclusion criteria after removing duplicates, screening of abstracts, and full text—four articles identified from hand-searching were incorporated, making a total of 23 eligible articles for the review. The studies’ findings revealed the preference for implementing costeffective virtual care based on the resource set, technological literacy, and consistent accessibility. Further, no significant differences in clinical outcomes were observed between two modes of care, virtual and in-person. The higher satisfaction by pregnant women and healthcare professionals indicated the continuity of the care. In addition, the hybrid model of virtual prenatal care integrated with traditional in-person care was acceptable to both low-risk and high-risk pregnant women. Virtual prenatal care substantially reduced travel time and absences from work, drops in clinic wait time and no-show rate, limited the risk of exposure during a pandemic, and increased self-accountability. Conclusion: Virtual prenatal care offers predominant advantages over in-person when it is carefully designed with the inclusion of pregnant women and healthcare professionals’ needs. Evidence showed that providing adequate technology training, proper instruction, and guidelines for initial setup and assurance of a reliable and accessible system is vital in increasing access to care.

• Ghimire Subedi, Sarala; Martinez, Santiago & Gerdes, Martin (2022). Self-imperative Care of Pregnancy using IoT Solutions. In Henriksen, André; Gabarron, Elia & Vimarlund, Vivian (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th Scandinavian Conference on Health Informatics. Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings. ISSN 978-91-7929-344-4. p. 64–68. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Typically, routine prenatal care includes several in-person visits with healthcare professionals by pregnant women, where fetal and maternal assessments are performed. This paper proposes an architectural framework for prenatal care using non-invasive, simple, and low-cost internet of things (IoT) monitoring system. The aim is to design an IoT-based architecture that serves as a fundamental system for self-imperative care in regular pregnancy check-ups in the comfort of the home that offers routine prenatalscreening tests. The system provides easy access to care regardless of the location and internet availability. We implemented preliminary architecture with simulated sensor data for blood pressure monitoring.

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