MIT Solve

Solution overview

Our Solution

Huckleberry

Tagline

Child specialists made accessible and affordable to all families with the help of AI

Pitch us on your solution

Our mission is to democratize access to child behavioral specialists. Every family should be able to receive expert & specific guidance so they can thrive and live their best life.

Every family with young children has a need for behavioral guidance, whether related to sleep, tantrums, positive discipline, eating, or speech & language. Specialists exist for each of these areas, but many families do not access them due to cost, inconvenience, stigma, feeling that their issues do not warrant a specialist, or being unaware that such expertise exists.

Huckleberry augments human specialists with AI, thereby reducing the cost to receive an analysis and plan for most families by 90%. Our AI writes the behavioral plan for the specialist, who then checks and confirms the plan, rather than needing to write it from scratch.

Through this global service, we can help every family thrive and provide early intervention to all.

What is the problem you are solving?

If a parent is too tired to do brain-building activities, or a child is in no mood to learn, you can have all the books and learning resources, but they would be going into a "leaky bucket" if the child is not sleeping well, or there are other behavioral issues going on.

Research shows chronically disrupted sleep is a widespread problem with many ramifications, including school performance, cognitive development, hyperactivity, obesity, maternal depression, and family disruption.

Parents want their children to sleep better, eat better, and engage in enriching activities, but often the reality is that they just don't know how to improve sleep, their child won't eat the vegetables, and is throwing tantrums. This takes its toll on the family's stress level and parent-child relationship.

In moments like these, generic tips or parenting lessons are either ineffective or too much for the parent to handle.

There are child specialists who are able to help in these situations: pediatric sleep consultants, occupational therapists, applied behavior analysts, child psychologists, speech & language pathologists, and more.

However, they are expensive or limited to those with more acute issues.

Huckleberry uses AI to make these specialists accessible to all.

Who are you serving?

Our target population is parents of 0-5 year olds, and their children. With Huckleberry, it costs less than a co-pay to receive an analysis & plan from an expert, created just for them. We also have a free tracking app with predictive algorithms.

Over the years of working directly with tens of thousands of parents, and indirectly with over 150,000 through our app, we have come to understand that everyone has different needs and situations. They need very specific guidance accordingly. Both our human experts and AI take into account schedule constraints, housing constraints, child disposition, parenting philosophy, and more.

We have created sleep improvement plans for a student mom whose dad came to care for her baby while she was in class. We helped grandparents who found themselves with custody of their twin grandchildren. We helped a family who all sleeps together in the same bed.

We continuously gather feedback from the experts and the families' progress to improve our system and processes. By combining human experts with AI, we are able to build a solution that works for every situation in a scalable way.

What is your solution?

We augment human experts with AI by drastically improving the time it takes to write up a report, thereby cutting costs.

Normally when a therapist works with a client, they have in their head what they would recommend. Then they spend 60-90 minutes putting a plan together for the client.

Huckleberry uses AI to do a first pass on generating that plan. It is not simply choosing from a set of pre-canned plans. Rather, the AI system builds each plan from the bottom up, taking into account over 50 metrics, and writes it as a human would. Now the therapist just needs to check, confirm, and modify where needed. Any changes the specialist makes is then fed back into our system, along with progress data from the family.

A single plan could be 10-15 pages long if it were all in one document, but it is presented to the parent in an easy-to-digest hierarchy, broken down by steps that start with easy wins. Parents can indicate whether they started on a recommendation, and how it went. They can get modifications or ask follow-up questions as needed.

Parents access Huckleberry through an app, which increases accessibility. Rather than needing to set up and travel to an appointment, parents provide information through the app and answer an adaptive questionnaire that mimics speaking with an expert.

We have started with sleep, and will be expanding into additional areas, including feeding/eating, behavior (e.g., tantrums and positive discipline), and speech & language development.

Why is this level of specificity needed, and why do general parenting tips not work? Let's take tantrums as an example. A time-out can be effective (if done properly) when a child hits because he wanted something he couldn't have. However, suppose you asked the same child to clean up, and then he started hitting and threw a tantrum. A time-out in that case reinforces the negative behavior because he just got out of what he didn't want to do. Our experts and AI would be able to look for patterns, codify the root of the tantrums, and provide guidance on how to prevent the tantrums on the positive side, and negative consequences that fit the scenario, child, and parent.

By providing guidance that respects both child and parent, we help to establish secure caregiver-child attachments, increase caregiver knowledge, increase children's social/emotional competence, and reduce the risk of abuse and neglect.

Select only the most relevant.

Reduce barriers to healthy physical, mental, and emotional development for vulnerable populations
Enable parents and caregivers to support their children’s overall development

Where is your solution team headquartered?

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Our solution's stage of development:

Growth