A Bowling Green mother is helping other women have healthy pregnancies.

She used knowledge gained through clinical research to create an app.

Our Laura Rogers explains how she hopes it inspires expectant mothers to, quote, bump up their activity levels.

Technology makes it really easy to not move, and one of the best things we can do for our overall health is just to stay active.

As an associate professor in exercise science at WQ and avid runner and a mother of four, Dr. Rachel Tennis is in a unique position to encourage expectant mothers to keep moving.

I joke she's my boss.

And baby, she's.

She's run the Boston Marathon.

Yes, you heard correctly.

Tennis ran the Boston Marathon at 12 weeks pregnant.

It's so easy to feel like during pregnancy that you should just take it easy and relax.

It's kind of like the misconception that's been in our society for quite a while.

But really, the exact opposite is true.

She says exercise can be key to managing health concerns that may arise during pregnancy.

Like hypertension, high blood sugar, weight control and mental health challenges.

Those are all things that can be mitigated with an active.

Lifestyle and active lifestyle.

But she wanted to help women find a blueprint.

We started on the ground floor.

We started with focus groups with pregnant postpartum women and obstetric providers and asked, What do you want in an app?

The idea was conceived more than five years ago and late last year bumped up was born.

Even under resourced environments, women have cell phones.

That's something that we know pretty well.

A digital tool to help pregnant and postpartum women stay healthy and active.

We're always improving debugging, working on fixes as we get more and more users.

So it went live in December, but we feel like we're really kind of hitting our stride right now as we have made some great improvements.

The goal is to improve pregnancy outcomes, leading to healthier moms and babies, tailoring safe workouts to individual needs.

What you enjoy and what I enjoy are going to be different, and we want to make sure that we're giving something to every single mom that she can get her 150 minutes of exercise a week.

It is especially needed in Kentucky, where obesity rates tend to be higher compared to the rest of the country.

That translates straight over into pregnancy outcomes.

So maternal morbidity and mortality is another national crisis right now.

But Kentucky is among the very worst in terms of those rates.

As a clinical researcher and faculty member says, she never set out to design a commercial product.

But I had this realization of I can spend my entire career creating something, but if I don't commercialize it, nobody ever sees it.

But with bumped up now available, expectant mothers can find safe, effective exercises that are good for both mom and baby.

Change the narrative and say, okay, now this is my opportunity to fix a lot of things that I can fix in my life and make me healthier.

And that's going to help my baby for their entire life and the rest of my life.

So I think that that's a really important message to get out there.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Laura Rogers.

Thanks, Laura.

The app also have workouts planned for up to 12 weeks after your baby is born.

The goal is for bumped up to eventually be covered by insurance so it's free for everyone.