Promoting Women’s Health in the Digital Age

The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has focused efforts into developing new tools to aid in promoting women’s health in the digital age, healthful pregnancy and birth into early childhood. Their goal is to keep mother and baby both safe and healthy. The apps are available for download here or here! Below are a few of the offerings.

Ask Karen was created to answer food safety question. Because it is available on mobile devices, it becomes the go-to app to answer timely food safety questions while about town (grocery store, farmer’s market etc…). Available between 10am and 4 pm (EST), a food safety expert answers and clarifies questions regarding food safety. Also available is access to the USDA Meat and Poultry hotline if one wanted to speak to someone directly and not chat.

Learn about your body in 52 weeks. For those women interested in learning more about their health, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) have developed the Women’s Health app. It consists of 52 alphabetical topics intended to be used weekly. It’s goal is education and the promotion and reinforcement of healthy lifestyles. Additionally, weekly sessions often provide practical strategies to be used daily. One can keep track of mediations, medical conditions and allergies, set and track goals and enter daily journal entries. For example, one focus topic concentrates how research medicine (laboratory findings) transition into medical treatments.

Embryo This app is for those people amazed and curious as to how a simple group of cells (an embryo) evolves into a human. The app is sponsored by the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and it offers information on embryo development and pregnancy. This database houses videos demonstrating fertilization and stages of development during pregnancy. Additionally, it provides both 2-D and 3-D images renditions of key stages of embryo and fetal growth and development.