A MedTech startup backed by godfather of AI, Yoshua Bengio, announced today the launch of its Baby Cry Insights App. The AI baby cry translator translates baby language and tells parents why their baby is crying by analyzing unique characteristics in their cry sounds. Created to empower parents to better understand and monitor their newborns’ needs, the app is a breakthrough achievement realized through years of research and collaboration with children’s hospitals. The company says the AI algorithm behind the app, was trained on thousands of clinically-labelled cry recordings.
“Crying is the primary means by which newborns express their needs“
but parents, especially first-timers, find it challenging to interpret them,” said Charles Onu, Co-founder and CEO of Ubenwa Health. “Baby Cry Insights is an AI co-parent designed to solve this problem. But this is only the beginning. Soon, parents will receive deep health insights from a simple recording of their baby’s cry on our platform.”
Ubenwa reports that within 2 months of the product’s beta launch, the app has been downloaded by parents in 150 countries – an indication of the universality of the problem they are tackling. The app data shows that “pain” appears to be the most common cause of infant crying at 45%. The other top reasons were hunger and discomfort. “While it might seem scary at first glance, the pain category really covers everything from a belly ache to a physical trauma”, said Dr Samantha Latremouille, Ubenwa co-founder who holds a PhD in experimental medicine from McGill University.
“To survive, the human infant has evolved to communicate its needs via different patterns of crying,” Dr Ganesh Srinivasan, a neonatologist at University of Manitoba, said in a statement. “Clinicians have known this for several decades and have learned to listen to these signs. The big question is can we harness advanced AI techniques today to make the infant cry easy to decipher by anyone.”
How can I use Baby Cry Insights
For Ubenwa Health, launching the Baby Cry Insights app is a foundational step in their journey towards establishing the infant cry as a vital sign for early detection of medical conditions. As a spinout from Mila, the renowned AI institute, the company has direct access to some of the best AI talent and resources in the world.
Baby Cry Insights is now available for download on both iOS and Android platforms.
Read more about AI here.
