This study offers an in-depth account of how postpartum women navigate digital health tools within a broader landscape of fragmented, infant-centered care. Women described apps, wearables, online communities, and virtual visits as extending support between clinical encounters, helping them organize infant and self-care and feel less alone, while also introducing new forms of burden and worry. Rather than seeing women as simply eager or resistant users, our findings show that they weigh potential benefits against effort, emotional impact, and trust. This suggests that the promise of postpartum digital health depends on how well tools are designed for and embedded in women’s everyday realities after birth.

Across health systems, postpartum care often shifts quickly from a focus on the pregnant person to a focus on the infant, with persistent gaps in maternal follow-up. Mothers describe feeling left out and having unmet information needs about their own recovery and mental health, reinforcing the sense that the system’s attention moves away from them once the baby is born (17,18). In response, many women assemble “hybrid” support networks that combine in-person and virtual contact with healthcare providers, alongside structured peer programs and informal online communities. Qualitative studies show that mothers value opportunities to connect with both professionals and peers across the first postpartum year, and that peer forums and group supports can be critical spaces for validation, stigma reduction, and sharing practical strategies, particularly for those experiencing postpartum depression or distress(19–21). These findings suggest that digital tools can act as conduits that connect mothers to multiple forms of support when formal care is time-limited or difficult to access.

In our focus groups, digital tools played an organizational and interpretive role in women’s everyday routines. Apps, smart monitors, wearables, and portals helped track infant feeding and sleep, as well as maternal sleep, activity, and symptoms, giving concrete records that could be used to answer questions, notice patterns, and feel more prepared for appointments. Evaluations of postnatal apps and infant-feeding trackers report similar benefits, with mothers describing tracking and stage-specific information as reassuring during the transition to parenthood and helpful for structuring conversations with providers (22,23). Perinatal digital health studies likewise describe women using apps, portals, and web resources to understand test results, track symptoms, and feel more in control of their and their child’s care (11,24). This sense of control can strengthen parental self-efficacy, understood as a parent’s belief in their ability to manage parenting tasks and positively influence their child’s development, and higher parenting self-efficacy is consistently linked to fewer depressive symptoms(25). In the mental health space, ecological momentary assessment and mood-tracking apps have been perceived by perinatal women and providers as promising for detecting emerging difficulties between visits, particularly when feedback is easy to interpret and connected to clear follow-up options (26). Together, this suggest that postpartum women already rely on digital tools to lighten the mental load of managing care and to advocate for themselves within time-limited, often fragmented services.

At the same time, the content and configuration of current tools often did not match what women felt they needed. Similar to our findings, analyses of postnatal apps found that fetal and infant development content is common, while information on maternal self-care and psychological well-being is comparatively sparse or fragmented (27). Women in our study described wanting brief mood check-ins, simple explanations of what emotional changes are typical versus concerning, and clear paths to support, which aligns with evidence that low-burden mood monitoring and psychoeducation can increase awareness and prompt earlier help-seeking when embedded in appropriate care pathways (26,28,29). Personalization and flexibility were also key: women wanted to decide what to track, how often reminders appear, and what could be shared with partners or other caregivers. Evaluations of infant-feeding and parenting apps show that context-specific prompts, customizable features, and clear evidence-based content are associated with perceived relevance and sustained engagement (30,31).

Additionally, preferred future tools in our focus groups were integrated with existing health portals, endorsed by Canadian or governmental bodies, and co-designed with postpartum women and frontline clinicians, which is consistent with maternal mHealth research showing that participatory, evidence-informed, and institutionally backed apps are perceived as more credible and usable(32,33). Co-design with mothers, researchers, and healthcare teams is therefore not only a technical approach to improving usability, but also a way to ensure that postpartum tools reflect mothers’ priorities while remaining clinically useful for providers. It can also make data and design choices more transparent, which is particularly important in light of the burdens, pressures, and privacy concerns women described in relation to existing technologies.

Women in our study underscored that digital health tools could intensify, rather than ease, the demands of the postpartum period. Some found it hard to adopt and sustain use of new apps or devices while sleep-deprived and busy with infant care, while others felt pressured to log everything or were discouraged by generic prompts that did not reflect normal postpartum recovery, which sometimes increased guilt and self-criticism instead of reassurance. Studies of postpartum and perinatal self-monitoring tools report similar patterns, with high tracking demands and rigid targets linked to information overload, technostress, and feelings of surveillance or failure (34–36). The postpartum period is a moment of reduced capacity: fragmented sleep, recovery from birth, and a sharp rise in caregiving workload, during which poorly designed digital tools add workload without proportionate benefit, helping to explain the non-adoption and abandonment patterns reported across perinatal mHealth (12).

Privacy and data-governance concerns, particularly around infant information in commercial apps, added a further layer of strain. This echoes work on the “datafied child,” which highlights how routine tracking practices (e.g., sleep, feeding, growth, milestones) can create extensive digital records about children with limited transparency or parental control, raising ethical concerns about surveillance and data use (37). Addressing these practical and ethical burdens is therefore essential if postpartum digital tools are to support, rather than undermine, maternal wellbeing and to remain acceptable and sustainable for women who are already navigating a demanding and vulnerable period.

This study represents an important first step in broader co-design research. The co-design of digital health interventions typically begins with user-centered groundwork, such as in-depth qualitative research to understand users’ needs, priorities, and everyday contexts, before moving into participatory design activities and iterative prototyping(38,39). The focus group data presented here provide a practical foundation for that process by outlining concrete expectations for content, functionality, integration, and data governance from the perspective of postpartum women. Future phases should build on these findings to work directly with postpartum mothers, clinicians, and health-system partners to co-develop, prototype, and evaluate a mother-centered digital health platform that is embedded in routine postpartum care pathways.