A Pregnancy Tracking App Like Ovia: How do you Build it?

With the growing focus on women’s health and FemTech, pregnancy tracking apps serve as a wise companion for women throughout those nine months.

Modern FemTech businesses understand the need to fill the women’s care management gap and develop solutions customized to women’s bodies and preferences rather than merely marketing general health products and services to female consumers. 

Pregnancy tracking apps are a bi-product of FemTech’s solution that serves expectant mothers by providing valuable information, personalized insights, and support throughout the pregnancy journey. Apps like Ovia offer features such as tracking symptoms, monitoring fetal development, providing health tips, and connecting with a community of other users. 

The market of FemTech is consistently growing but is the least trusted in the healthcare industry. 

A study conducted in early 2023 by Secure Data Recovery revealed some of the concerning insights. Out of the top 10 apps that respondents felt were the most untrustworthy, five were women’s health apps that tracked periods and pregnancy, topping users’ concerns about the trustworthiness of FemTech apps.

Hence, this presents a great opportunity for healthcare companies to develop a femtech app that safeguards women’s data and gives them the most accurate pregnancy results. 

If you are considering developing a pregnancy-tracking app similar to Ovia, here are some key steps to guide you on how to create a pregnancy-tracking app.

The Market Potential of a Pregnancy App

The global market for pregnancy tracking app development is expected to experience steady growth between 2024 and 2030, constituting a market share projected to reach USD 874.8 million in 2030.  

This growth rate is partly a result of continuous technological advancements, growing environmental awareness, and the increasing need for efficient operations. 

Industry players, such as Ovia, have shifted their focus to product innovation, strategic collaborations, and geographical expansion to seize evolving market opportunities. For example, Ovia has been a contributor to over 18+ million family journeys across 200+ countries and territories because of many features alongside the different stages of parenthood journeys, like monitoring your baby’s development and finding clinically-backed answers to all your pregnancy questions.

A pregnancy app is a great companion for expectant mothers as they get to monitor their pregnancy progress, manage appointments, and access crucial information and advice for their stress-free journey towards a healthy delivery. This is why the National Library of Medicine in the United States has recognized the significance of pregnancy tracking apps in its research, with an acceptance rate exceeding 6%.

Features of a Pregnancy Tracking App like Ovia

Ovia is a comprehensive pregnancy tracking app that helps families navigate their pregnancy journey easily. Founded in 2016 by Erin Peleg and Paris Norton, Ovia aims to deliver personalized, evidence-based health information during pregnancy.

What makes Ovia’s adoption increasingly high is the intutive interface that provides hyper personalised clinical-driven insights and advice to users. 

Out of the many features of this app, Ovia’s intuitive interface and easy-to-use design allow it to track a woman’s pregnancy progress and provide personalized insights and advice. Ovia’s features include tracking symptoms, monitoring fetal growth, and providing articles. It also connects you with other mothers and offers a supportive online community.

This Shows us the Essential Features of Any Pregnancy Tracking App.

• User Registration: User registration allows users to create accounts and log in without hindrance. 

Here is the subset of user registration to streamline 

• Login/sign in via email
• Login/Sign in via Google accounts
• Login/sign in via social media accounts

Giving multiple registration options allows users to create an account and personalize their own experience based on their preferences.

• Personalized Tracking: Pregnancy is a nine month long journey and the body undergoes several changes throughout pregnancy and post delivery. Hence, personalized tracking helps users monitor pregnancy and baby growth with clinical updates on health tips, articles, and baby development.
• Appointment Scheduling: Easy appointment scheduling feature allows users to easily see the doctor or medical professional whenever the need occurs. 
• Symptom Tracker:  Symptom tracker assists pregnant ladies in tracking and recording symptoms throughout their pregnancy, providing relevant advice.
• Community Forum: A community forum serves as a common space for users to connect with other parents, share experiences, and seek support on their own journey.
• Integration with IoT devices: There are many devices, like Fitbit, that monitor vitals and more, which can help streamline the pregnancy journey and reflect if any underlying issue persists. The integration with such devices is an essential feature of any pregnancy app.
• Safety Lookups: Safety lookups provide information on foods, medications, symptoms, and safety guidelines.
• Health Tracking and Logging: This feature allows users to log and monitor weight, sleep cycle, mood swings, physical exercise & activity, and more.
• Health Alerts: Continuous health alerts allow users to track symptoms timely and provide real-time feedback to manage doctor visits and medications.
• Child Development Tracking: Child development tracking enables easy access to a child’s growth within the mother’s womb with customizable milestones.

How To Build A Pregnancy Tracking App Like Ovia?

Gone are the days when people solely relied on hefty books or eagerly awaited advice from family and friends to smoothen their pregnancy journey. Now, with the help of a pregnancy tracking app, mothers can easily track their little one’s growth and connect with fellow parents-to-be. These apps are like having a wise friend who’s always there when you need them. 

With easy steps, here’s how healthcare companies can develop pregnancy tracker apps like Ovia in simple steps.

Define Your App’s Purpose and Features

To get started with the pregnancy and baby tracking app development process, the best approach is to focus on delivering value to the users. 

For this, it’s important to understand the expectation of the expectant mother from such app and what purpose it serves to them. 

Some mothers may seek a broad assortment of educational resources regarding pregnancy, which can empower women to make better decisions about their health. Some may seek clinical guidance through the app, or some may even want the app to oversee their pregnancy journey at home. 

Hence, as a first step,  understand the needs and preferences of expectant mothers so that your app’s features can be tailored accordingly.

For example, you can include tools for tracking the development of the fetus and tips on nutrition and exercise during pregnancy. The list of detailed features is mentioned in a separate section of the blog.

Design User-Friendly Interface

Mobile health (mHealth) apps can offer a suite of solutions to women of reproductive age who are expecting a child and are frequent consumers of Web-based health information. Hence, once the features are defined, engage with design experts to create interactive prototypes of the app. 

Expectant mothers, who may be experiencing physical and emotional changes, and with the help of an easy-to-use app effortlessly, they can access information quickly, and engage with features without confusion or frustration.

Develop Backend Infrastructure

Having a robust backend infrastructure is important to help mother navigate through their journey via the app without fail. 

The only way to make people trust the pregnancy app is to use robust data security measures. Femtech as an industry is very personal. Hence, the data at every stage of pregnancy must be stored and protected securely to reduce errors. 

It’s really important to understand that errors in the pregnancy app data can be fatal. Hence, robust security measures to protect user data, including compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR

For scalability, build a scalable backend infrastructure to handle increasing user traffic and data storage requirements. 

Here’s How the Backend Infrastructure of a Pregnancy Tracking App May Look Like

Implement AI and Machine Learning

Since pregnancy is a journey, implementing AI and ML in apps can give a competitive edge. AI helps in personalized pregnancy planning by offering customized preference-based advice and information based on individual health data. Advanced algorithms analyze factors such as pre-existing health conditions, lifestyle choices, and fertility indicators to guide the optimal time for conception. This personalized approach empowers individuals to make informed decisions as they embark on the journey to parenthood.

With AI-enabled pregnancy tracking apps, women could set goals for maintaining weight and reminders for prenatal exercise or healthy eating habits according to their needs.

AI algorithms can also detect and predict complications in the pregnancy journey. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that AI-based algorithms can predict the risk of complications such as preeclampsia with an accuracy of up to 90%.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Healthcare apps must comply with regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and FDA (if applicable), to ensure patients’ data is secured. Pregnancy-tracking apps manage and analyze vast amounts of data efficiently. This is a big task, especially with strict rules around how health data must be collected and stored. 

With pregnancy tracking app development services, it’s not just about meeting regulations; it’s about how we handle essential data and derive value-driven outcomes. As we say, healthcare as an industry is very personal. Hence, each step towards app development should constitute the security of the user data.

As a crucial step in mobile app development for pregnancy tracking, implement security measures to protect user’s sensitive information from unauthorized access, breaches, or cyberattacks. This includes data transmission encryption, secure data storage, strong authentication mechanisms, regular security audits, and compliance with industry standards such as OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) guidelines.

Test and Iterate

The continuous testing and iteration approach to pregnancy-tracking app development involves a cyclical process of testing, gathering feedback, and making iterative improvements to enhance the app’s performance and user experience. This is an important step to refine the app based on user input, ensuring that it effectively meets the needs and expectations of expectant mothers.

Here are the Widely Used Testing Approaches

1. Usability Testing to evaluate how easily users can navigate the app, interact with features, and accomplish tasks. 
2. Functional Testing to ensure that all features and functionalities of the app work as intended.
3. Performance Testing to asses its speed, responsiveness, and stability.
4. Compatibility Testing to ensure a consistent user experience across various platforms.
5. Security Testing to identify and address vulnerabilities that could compromise user data or the app’s integrity.

Pregnancy Tracking App Development: Know the Cost

The cost to build a pregnancy tracking app depends on a number of factors, such as 

• App design
• App features
• Number of platforms the app will be launched on
• Technology inclusion
• Development team structure and geographical location.

In-house Development vs Outsourcing Pregnancy Tracking App Development

An in-house team is usually considered beneficial for developing any application in terms of familiarity with the ecosystem and better control over the project. However, hiring, creating a workspace, covering medical licenses, and training an in-house team may cost more than outsourcing the development process. Outsourcing the development significantly reduces the cost of a pregnancy tracking app. Additionally, you gain access to a vast talent pool equipped to fulfill your app development needs with their expertise in the field.

Note: The average pregnancy-tracking app development costs provided above are for comparison purposes among two teams based on a 1,000-hour development timeframe.

Process-wise Cost Estimation for Pregnancy Tracking App Development

The total cost of building a pregnancy tracking app may differ based on the process implemented to develop it. The duration of each step (consulting, design, development, testing, and deployment) influences costs, and more complex projects may require extended development timelines. Based on this factor, the cost can range from USD 30,000 to USD 90,000. 

Additionally, the complexity and technology of the app development ecosystem can significantly impact the cost. Depending on the environment’s complexity and advanced features, the cost can range between USD 90,000 and USD 130,000.

Innovations in FemTech

FemTech is a relatively new technology sector (the term was proposed in 2016). Still, the market potential is growing continuously, with more and more female users relying on applications that aim to strengthen their health management and bridge their healthcare gaps. By developing an ethically compliant and feature-rich pregnancy tracking app, healthcare companies can fulfill their promise to enhance women’s well-being and promote just and compassionate innovations.

Partnering with a mobile app development company can reveal a more nuanced picture of your pregnancy tracking app solution idea.

As an innovation-intensive customer experience company, Successive Digital strengthens app development with a strategic thinking approach, driving immediate, lasting, and measurable impact. 

Get in touch with us today.