Nearly half of pregnant people in the US are on Medicaid, and this low-income group has a significantly elevated risk for birth-related complications. TrueMotif, a social impact startup from the University of Oregon’s Center for Translational Neuroscience, took aim at these disparities with a program targeting the primary determinants of poor birth outcomes: prenatal stress, and unhealthy prenatal behaviors. Small studies delivering this protocol through a bootstrapped app mockup showed it to be engaging and remarkably effective: pregnant mothers who used the program were nearly 6x less likely to deliver a preterm infant and nearly 12x less likely to deliver a low birthweight infant.

With proof-of-concept under its belt, the team asked us to turn GrowMotif into a user-ready app they could use to test and deliver this game-changing program at-scale.

We helped TrueMotif refine the avatar coach’s script to match real conversation patterns. Based on user feedback during the design phase, we broke up the content to deliver each new thought/theme in a separate message, (the way a human respondent might), and we incorporated more markers of real human expression (including emojis and conversational pauses) into the prompts and user response options.

From its simple but effective backend to its elegantly integrated UI, GrowMotif was designed so that its content and appearance can be easily changed. This flexibility will allow TrueMotif to adapt and apply the app’s structure to other health support contexts – such as nutrition counseling for diabetics, activity programs for heart disease prevention, and more.