Postpartal depression (PPD) is a socially relevant use case: around one in ten women is affected by PPD. Emotional support from partners, family, friends or professionals can help identify and treat postpartum depression early enough. Modern technologies such as messenger apps promise to enable social and emotional connection even at a distance. In the context of PPD, however, they are not yet able to fulfil this promise: Shame, stigmatisation and the stressful new everyday life with a child make access to the target group with PPD particularly challenging. An innovative, responsible technology design is therefore needed that avoids stigma, social pressure and additional stress in order to integrate seamlessly into the everyday lives of young families.

As part of NEST, OFFIS develops innovative socio-technical designs for the prevention and early detection of postpartal depression (PPD) together with the Department of Early Help/Prevention of the City of Oldenburg. NEST is one of 300 DATIPilot innovation sprints.

NEST seeks to develop and test socio-technical designs for multimodal, implicit and everyday human-technology interaction. In particular, the focus is on displayless technologies that fit seamlessly into the new everyday life with a child. The vision is that the interaction design developed in NEST creates social connectedness, provides information about PPD and is embedded in low-threshold urban support services.