Dr. ChristianavonHippel, a postdoctoral fellow with the Wallace Center, studies User Innovation among diverse communities of women who, when professionally designed interventions are either inaccessible or insufficient, develop health-promoting interventions to meet their own needs.
Currently, Dr. vonHippel is analyzing 7 million user-generated comments from social networks to find out what pregnancy, postpartum, and newborn care concerns new mothers communicate with peers rather than health professionals to help solve. Through this work, she has discovered hundreds of behavioral innovations and product innovations developed by women to meet their own and their babies' needs. For example, one mother made popsicles out of breastmilk using a pacifier-like mold when her baby was teething, which is an excellent alternative to using less healthy fruit juice to make popsicles, and which provides cost-savings compared to traditional plastic teething rings. A number of the innovations from Dr. vonHippel's research are generalizable techniques that may be low-cost, simple to implement, and beneficial for mother and child’s wellbeing – thereby making them accessible even to resource-poor communities.
Dr. vonHippel recently published an article further describing how community-developed interventions can be identified, evaluated, and diffused to benefit public health within and beyond women’s health issues. Read the article here