Nicole Scott credits an app with saving her daughter’s life.

The app, called Count the Kicks, helped the first-time mother monitor her daughter Olivia’s movements during her third trimester, which allowed her to spot an anomaly that left unchecked would have cost Olivia her life.

Now, advocates have brought the national program associated with the app to Maine and are hoping it will catch on as an educational tool for major health care providers in this state.

Scott, 37, of Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, said she picked up the app “on a whim” in 2020. What she didn’t know was how it would eventually prompt her to seek medical attention before her due date. Doctors discovered a fetal maternal hemorrhage, or excessive bleeding, and acted quickly to deliver Olivia early. 

“They basically said if I didn’t come when I came, she would have been a stillbirth,” she said.

Count the Kicks is now running in 26 states including Maine. It helps expectant mothers like Scott track their unborn baby’s movements and better identify a possible problem.

State health officials introduced the program in Maine in March and hope that larger health care providers will adopt and use it in their daily practice. 

The program provides materials for tracking a fetus’s activity, from paper charts to wristbands to a smartphone app available in more than 20 different languages. Parents can document exactly how, when and the frequency that their unborn baby moves. 

Morgan Miller, a midwife at Soft Corner Midwifery and Birth Center in Bath, said she was eager to see it brought to Maine.

If a stillbirth can be prevented, Miller said, “we should be doing everything we can” to make that so.

Nationally, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the rate of stillbirths has been declining since 1990. The data showed there were 21,000 stillbirths nationwide in 2020.

In Maine, about 69 babies are stillborn every year, according to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Most of those deaths are preventable just by paying more targeted attention to how much the baby moves in the womb, according to the center’s director, Dr. Puthiery Va.

“We know that it does translate to lives being saved for parents,” she said.

Miller is leading the charge along with Maine CDC to get the program adopted throughout the state. 

“Some providers just don’t know that it exists,” she said. 

The program offers educational materials for health care providers about how to track an unborn baby’s movements, starting at 28 weeks. 

Any variation in the typical pattern, Miller said, could be a warning. The program encourages parents to alert a health care provider, which could be key to avoiding a tragedy.

In Iowa, the program was responsible for a more than 30% reduction in stillbirths over a 10-year period, according to the Maine CDC.

The program is driven by and paid for the nonprofit and grant funding, making it free for hospital groups and their patients. Va said she is hoping the new program will become widespread, as it has in other states. 

“We’re hoping that our health care providers can help spread the word,” she said.

Scott’s daughter Olivia was born in August of 2020. She needed three blood transfusions and suffered a seizure, but survived, and will likely grow out of any lingering health problems, Scott said.

“Honestly if you saw her, she looks like a typical toddler,” she said.

The lesson, Scott said, is simply that expectant mothers need to pay careful attention to their baby’s movements, and not be afraid to speak up if anything abnormal happens at all. 

“It’s the baby’s way of communicating,” she said.