MaMa-X

  In developing countries, such as Nigeria, 16% of expectant mums and 20% of new mothers experience mental disorders, primarily postpartum depression and/or anxiety. Cases can be so severe that mothers may be suicidal or become oblivious of their child’s health. As a result, her child’s growth and development is negatively impacted. 

According to a study from University of Manchester, Children of mothers with depression/anxiety are significantly less likely to receive preventative health vaccinations during the first 5years of life. It’s not news that lack of vaccination contributes greatly to infant mortality and morbidity.

The proposed solution, MaMa-X, is designed for women, new and expectant mothers. It uses Mobile Technology, Data Engineering and Machine Learning to analyse anomalies in users’ social and behavourial patterns for early detection of depression and anxiety before/after childbirth. It provides support via an intelligent chatbot and group therapy. MaMa-X also provides vaccination reminders and tracker.

Depression and anxiety are the 2 most common mental illnesses among women. A Woman is 4 times more likely to feel depressed during and/or after birth and this affects her child directly and indirectly. NIH also reports the possibility of depression passing from parents to children.

Based on these, MaMa-X helps with:

Mental-Health Care: The mental state of mothers and pregnant women cannot be over-emphasized. A mother who suffers depressive disorders may fail to adequately care for herself and her baby. In 2018, CDC reported overdose and suicide as the top causes of maternal death during pregnancy and one year postpartum.  

Up to 36% of Nigerian mothers attending primary health-centers suffers from depression/anxiety. Unfortunately, communication between health-workers and patients is extremely authoritarian, making disclosure of psychological and emotional distress difficult and stigmatized. 

Vaccination Tracker: WHO reports that in 2017, 77% of children up till 23 months old missed some vaccination routine and more than 80% of mothers do not know which vaccines have been administered to their babies. In many countries, Nigeria inclusive, health-centers maintains a paper-based system which provides parents with a card to track administered vaccines. Unfortunately, these are easily misplaced, causing parents to lose vaccine records.

MaMa-X provides the following features:

1. Self Care mental-exercise targeted for mothers

2. Meet-other-Mums(MoMs) support group/forum

3. Intelligent Chatbot for cognitive-behavioral-therapy(CBT) sessions

4. Vaccination reminder and tracker

Technology: MaMa-X is a user-friendly mobile and web app that is scalable on various devices and operating systems. 

Almost all mobile applications that analyses/interacts with users' data uses these data to send advertisements. Question is, why not use these data to help the users? 

MaMa-X uses machine-learning to understand users' social and behavioral patterns, observe frequencies of certain search-keywords (such as suicide, depression), detects anomaly patterns and draw up possible conclusions of a mental illness. 

Based on the analysed result set, targeted mental-exercises and pregnancy sensitisation are sent. 

MaMa-X has an intelligent customised chatbot feature which is used for one-on-one CBT sessions. This chatbot leverage Natural-Language-Processing(NLP) and Artificial Intelligence for smart, user-friendly and relatable interactions based on analysed result sets.

MaMa-X also provides a forum for mothers to interact and share experiences as a form of group therapy. Using the user's location and language, MaMa-X assigns users to a closer group to achieve a common sense of belonging and experience.

Lastly, MaMa-X assists mothers with timely reminders and proper tracking of vaccination for their infants

While MaMa-X is beneficial to all new/expectant mothers and women, we are placing focus on women, mothers and girls between the ages of 14 - 45 years majorly because they interact more with the internet and several recent studies (a referenced study by Jamanetwork) observed that on average, depression/Anxiety is 51% more common among millennial mothers than it was in their mother’s generation 25 years ago. 

Also, teenage mothers between the ages of 15 to 19 experiences postpartum depression at a rate twice as high as older women. This can be attributed to the fact that most teenage pregnancies are unplanned.

 The 50% increase in the risk of depression for 2 generations calls for a need to improve access to quality mental care for women. MaMa-X uses recent technologies and data analysis to predict and detect the onset of mental illness. It provides her the support and help she needs using 3 major features: 

1) a forum to meet other mothers from same background for support 

2) An intelligent chatbot whenever she wants to talk 

3) Several Mental exercises to improve sleep patterns, boost of moral/confidence etc.

    The proposed solution also provides timely reminder for vaccination and tracks administered vaccines.

Proper Vaccination and mental wellness are widely acknowledged as contributing factors to improved pregnancy and post-pregnancy outcomes for mothers and babies. Considering that mothers plays a crucial role in their child’s health, it is important that she is well taken care of and mentally stable

 MaMa-X has been designed to target women/mothers who suffer mild-to-serious mental health issues due to several underlying causes. This solution will listen to them, read patterns and detect early signs of depression/anxiety. It will send personalised messages/chats to help user’s mental health. If severe or prolonged cases are triggered, physical sessions can be arranged.

With the advent of technology, one of the first things we do when we need to find out more about something is to go online. Google search analysis shows that in the last 2years, there’s been a spike in search volumes across these 3 words - ‘stress’, ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’. Instagram analytics also shows a rise in engagement with posts related to “women depression". This trend is interesting as it means more people search their symptoms online than going to see a doctor. This is either attributed to lack of access to a specialist or fear of being stigmatised. While there are several available applications for mental wellness, none has been targeted specifically to women especially for ante/postpartum depression and anxiety. Secondly, most of these applications use questions/answer therapeutic sessions which makes them less interactive, monotonous and subjective to users’ input.(e.g, are you suicidal?)

MaMa-X, instead, learns about her users and asks less questions. This application predicts early signs of mental illness and the provide assistance specific to user’s condition

One of the major symptoms of Depression/anxiety is forgetfulness, MaMa-X has incorporated a vaccine reminder system that uses app notifications, SMS and automated calls to gently remind mothers of the need to care for their babies.

MaMa-X provides 2 resources, managing women mental health and vaccination reminders and tracker. 

For mental wellness, MaMa-X combines mobile technology, Big Data Analytics and Machine learning to monitor patterns and detect illness triggers. 

MaMa-X front-end has been developed using React Native, a cross platform mobile application framework while back-end is built with .NET Core. Python is used for modelling and since we envisage a large amount of data exchange, we have leveraged HBase, a non-relational database to provide real-time, random read/write access to Hadoop data with quick turnaround time.

Then the Chatbot and mental exercises uses Artificial Intelligence to interactively communicate with the user with specific target content.

For Vaccination reminders, in addition to the mobile technologies, Twilio, a cloud communications platform that allows applications to send phone calls and text messages using its APIs was used. Depending on the method reminder selected by the user, MaMa-X leverages  Twilio’s SMS and Voice Web APIs to send automated SMS and calls.

Data Analytics and Machine learning are recent technologies severally applied in predictive analysis and research. It is a best-fit technology for analysing raw data to find trends/ patterns and draw up conclusions. These technologies are applied in the development of top E-commerce websites, e.g Amazon uses users product search history to send marketing emails. Netflix also uses your past movies to predict movie suggestions.

Twilio is also a very popular cloud communication platform. It is used by top customer-based firms to send personalised messages; such firms include lyft, Airbnb, Uber etc

The community base for these technologies is large and very active. Development of MaMa-X leverages on these technology driven stacks and communities for technical integration.

Activity 1: Improving Maternal Mental Health

Theory of Change 1: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/how-social-media-analysis-can-improve-mental-health

Output: Specific Pregnancy Sensitisation

            One-on-one Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy (CBT)

            Group therapy and shared experiences

            Mental-health exercises

Short-term outcomes: 

• Mothers get the feeling of being understood and not  alone
• Time spent on the application reduces unnecessary internet searches that increases anxiety

Long-term outcomes: 

• Mothers are mental stable to care for their babies
• Relationship between Mothers and her kids is strengthen

Activity 2: Improving utilisation of Vaccination and Vaccination Tracker

Theory of Change: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702982/

https://www.who.int/features/2014/immunization-app/en/

Output 2: 

• Sensitization on the need for vaccines
• Reminder of vaccines to be administered and the due dates
• A schedule that tracks administered vaccines

Short-term outcomes 2: 

• Better understanding and increased awareness for mothers
• Mum is knowledgeable enough to ask her doctor or health official  questions around the vaccines her baby is receiving.
• Mums can inquire about missed vaccines and the next steps to take
• Proper vaccine data recording and tracking

Long-term outcomes 2: 

• Increased number of administered vaccines
• Fetal preventable deaths and diseases are reduced
• As adults, individuals are able to have information on what vaccines they were given when they were younger

Since this app is in pilot stage and hasn’t been rolled out, no user currently completely uses it. 

We have been rolling out in phases and have about 46 mothers testing this current prototype.

The plan is to completely deploy in the first quarter of 2021. Advertisement and publicity will start exactly 2 months before roll-out. 

Our target is to have 10,000 mothers registered and actively using the app by the second quarter of 2022. During this 1-year period, we understand that there may be a need to focus on application stability, user’s support and minor bug fixes. Resources for this will be put in place to ensure users get the worth of this application.

During development, we have taken into cognizance, the need to analyse large amounts of data and have designed a big data driven platform structure as such. 

In 5-years time, with rigorous advertising and publicity campaigns and strategies, we estimate that over 1,000,000 women will see the benefit of this application. We also have a vision to have partnership with mental therapist and social media platforms. Our aim and objective is to have a globe with healthy-minds

There are 4 specific Objectives we hope to achieve in 5-years time

1. Meet or exceed 1 million users on the app globally. We plan to maximize social media platforms, radio, daycares and word of mouth for publicity. 

2. Expand the app to accommodate mental wellness in teenagers and young adults. Every year, the number of teenage suicide increases with age ranging from 12 years to 25 years old. We plan to replicate the mental health wellness feature for teenagers and young adults.

3. Have the application in 3 additional languages (French, German and Spanish). This will grow a wider community outreach and user’s will be comfortable getting this application to interact in their local languages

4. Partner with mental therapists. Given the amount and usefulness of data we want users to have the ability to schedule an audio or video session with a mental therapist at very affordable cost. While we understand that there may be setbacks and challenges, we have structured plans in place to mitigate them

Adoption of application: Mobile apps are now an integral part of our daily life, with people spending an average of 5 hours per day with them. On the other hand, according to an existing literature, one in four installed apps has never been used or are used less frequently.

Country’s data privacy policy: This policy differs from countries to countries. Degree of regulation also varies from limited regulations to heavy regulations. Users may be unwilling to share their information due to security and privacy issues

3rd parties’ data policy: For MaMa-X to be as accurate as possible, we will need analyse data from different social media platforms such as monitoring if a User has been engaging in post related to depression, what he/she has been looking up online and how long he/she spends looking up “trigger” terms

Financial Cost: We have estimated a total expense of $62,650 for the first year. These expenses include development, advertisement and overhead cost. The economic impact of COVID-19 has also made expense difficult. Exchange rate has increased by 25% and so has goods and services

Adoption of application: There are various reasons why users do not use an application, e.g lack of good reviews, lack of evidence of usefulness, difficult user interface. 

MaMa-X is built with a simple, user-friendly and beautiful interface. We also have a strategy of posting statistics on users’ review and experiences to encourage new users.

Country’s data privacy policy: while we understand the varying data protection laws, we will ensure that users understand how MaMa-X uses and protects their data. It will be clear that users’ raw data will not be downloaded/saved with our company. We only interact with these data to analyse them locally on users’ phone. Also data will NEVER be shared with a 3rd party unless users specifically requested so. Even at that, Data shared will de-identified before sharing using end-to-end data encryption. 

3rd parties’ application data policy: while we also understand the different policies around data access from 3rd party application, we believe a partnership with MIT will give us a better stance and recognition while relating with these 3rd parties if and when the need arises

Financial Cost: we are a startup with innovative software products and software engineers. Our major source of income has been from developing in-house applications for organisations. 

We have written proposals to investors such as TEEF and YouWIN connect and also considering to apply for favorable SMEs loans. Though processes have slowed down due to the current pandemic situation, we are still hopeful and positive

Total number of staff : 11

Full time staff: 5

Part time staff: 4

Contract staff: 2

MaMa-X is a product of Aerglo Technologies. In the last 2years as a startup company, Aerglo Technologies has developed 3 enterprise applications for foreign and local firms 

The MaMa-X development team consists of individuals with very strong technical, analytical and product knowledge skills. A few strong competencies in the team are:

Mr Madauko Okoye: A graduate of Computer science from the University of Nigeria. He has over 5years active experience as a full stack software developer. He currently works for PWC (Price Waters Corporation) as senior software developer

Mr Nwanjoku Chikodi: Has an MSc degree in software engineering. He has a very strong background in data engineering with 7 years of experience in data analytics and machine learning. His core technical stack include Python, Scala, HBase and Adobe Spark.

Mrs. Janet Adeola: A mental therapist at the Lagos state general hospital. With over 8 years’ experience, she is well trained and licensed to treat clients with emotional, behavioral and mental disorders. she has significant knowledge in behavioral and social therapy. She is the subject matter expert for MaMa-X.

Miss Joy Etike: With 5 years’ experience as a Quality Assurance analyst, she applies standards and principles to ensure the development of the applications meets legal and user’s standards and appropriate policies. She also doubles as the product manager

We are currently not in partnership with any other organisation.

Customer Segment: 

• Mothers to monitor/track children vaccine

• Mothers with Ante/Postpartum anxiety/depression triggers

• Women in need of a confidant

Value Proposition:

• Automatically detect country location and sends automated vaccination reminders to mothers

• Close support group with similar background (location/ethnicity and language). This will be very helpful for mothers in ethnic minority group

• Intelligent chatbot and effective mental exercise for healthy minds

Channels for publicity:

• Social media pages targeted to mothers and women

•  Posters in strategic places like schools and daycares. 

• Partnership with MIT for exposure and media

Customer Relationship:

• Advertising and Referrals

•  Excellent service and policies, intelligent application

• Updating MaMa-X with new features that will be beneficial to mothers and women in general

Revenue stream: 

• Free features for the first 3 months. However, the group therapy and one-on-one Cognitive behavioural therapy will only be available for once a week. A small fee of $5 will be charged once for unlimited access

• On a long term, we are looking at partnering with certified mental therapists and psychologist so that users can have their session on the application at an affordable rate

• Prospective investors, sponsorship and/or grants

Key resources: 

• Office space and Workstations

• Human resources (full time, part-time and contract staff)

• Availability of Data

• Branding

• Financials

• Prospective Partnerships

Key Partners:

• Data custodians ( Facebook, Inc., Google, Twitter, pinterest)

• Twilio

Currently, MaMa-X provides users with all features free for the first 3 months. However, going forward, the group therapy and one-on-one Cognitive behavioural therapy will only be available for once a week. A small fee of $5 will be charged once for unlimited access.

Also, we are looking at the option of partnering with certified mental therapists and psychologist so that users can have their session on the application at an affordable price

We are also open for sponsorship and grants. We have sent several proposals to investors and we are hoping to get positive feedback.

On a long term, we plan to have a gift shop for family members to buy gift cards, cooked meal, basket of fruit, e.t.c for mothers as a way to show their love and support. We would also have points for active mothers on the group therapy forum and these points can in turn be used to purchase items from the gift store.

Data access policies: Being a Solve member equips an entrepreneur with several opportunities and increases the chance of a successful implementation and application adoption. Due to the peculiarity of this application, we hope to leverage MIT's global standard, recognition and legal advice especially around data analytic policies. 

Adoption of application: Also, to build a standard and globally accepted application, there’s always a need for intelligent criticism, mentorship and advice. These, and many more, I believe are the benefits that comes with the solver 9 month’s program.

Financial advice: Finally, Solve’s grant will go a long way to assist us push MaMa-X to every woman that needs it. 

Our vision is to have an early prediction of mental illness before it breaks the children and families. A healthy mom is a healthy family!

 Solution Technology: Building a customer-based solution needs a lot of expertise. A partnership in this area would be a great support by giving us advice on several approaches we can explore to achieve our aim

Funding and Revenue model: Managing finances as a startup is usually a hurdle. About 65% of startups fold-up in Nigeria barely 2 years after initiation due to poor financial decisions. With MIT’s expert, we would want to learn the different ways of getting and re-investing capital.

Legal/Regulatory matters: The development of MaMa-X will require very high and standard legal advice. We need legal and regulatory advice on how we can protect users’ analysed data and the conditions for sharing these data. 

Marketing, Media and exposure: A partnership and mentorship from MIT's marketing experts will massively increase our market share by using combination of traditional marketing techniques and innovative tools to create effective marketing strategies.

We hope to have a partnership with data custodians such as facebook, Inc. Google LLC, Pinterest etc. MaMa-X version 2, we hope to integrate with social media platforms such that on trigger of some pre-defined events, social media sites may adjust posts algorithms for depressed users such that they can get helpful posts. 

It is part of our plans to partner with hospitals, psychologists and mental therapists. One specific center we will like to partner with is BTH Wellness and Therapy in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria. We. believe their services on the application will go along way to help mothers who do not have access to physically visit a therapist

We would also benefit from a partnership and advice from Rob Matheson, a science writer and researcher at MIT. His research in 2018 on “Model can more naturally detect depression in conversations” may be very helpful to us

We would like to partner with Twilio. Since we use their service for automated calls and SMS alert, we could use their advice on how best to integrate their APIs to our software and also how best we can moderate charges for these services.

Depression among women is the most common and yet most ignored illness. Every woman has a 65% chance of feeling depressed at least once in her lifetime. According to WHO, 1 in 4 women is likely to have a major depression during pregnancy. 

While Major depression and anxiety are very serious, patients often show mild symptoms at initial stages. However, when left untreated, it leads to a lot of negativity. Families that do not understand mental health challenges may advise affected mums to “get over it”. Children of such mums may have behavioural issues, such as low self-esteem.

Suicide, being the 4th leading cause of death for girls/women between the ages of 16 – 65 is the effect of adverse mental illness. Our goal is to detect the illness early enough, help the affected woman as soon as possible using group and CBT therapies and refer her to a doctor in severe cases. 

Since Innovation for Women prize supports entrepreneurs and business ideas whose is to improve the lives of women using technology, we believe MaMa-X is a best fit. Improving the lives of women has a ripple effect. It goes further to helping families, communities, and countries achieve long-lasting benefits.

With this prize, we will ensure that our publicity strategy is massive enough to reach as many women as possible.

Depression is a major public health problem that is reportedly twice as common in women during the childbearing age as it is in men. It accounts for the greatest burden of disease among all mental health problems, and it is expected to become the second most prevalent of all general health problems globally by 2020.

MaMa-X is unarguably a good candidate for this prize as this application provides mental health support and assistance to mothers. Depression and anxiety is more common among low income households, families with inadequate social support, stressful life events such as physical and emotional abuse etc. With the group therapy forum, mothers can link up with each other to share experiences, get comfort or even get help when needed.

Up to 20% of mothers attending primary healthcare centres in developing countries suffer from anxiety and/or depressive disorders. Unfortunately, in most healthcare centres, communication between health workers and women patients is extremely authoritarian, making disclosure of psychological and emotional distress difficult, and stigmatising. 

MaMa-X, a simple but easy to use mobile application will analyse user’s behavioural and social patterns to detect anomalies. Specific and encouraging messages will be sent to users and when cases are severe, they will be referred to a mental therapist.

 The health workforce innovation prize will be very useful to us as we hope to partner with certified and experienced mental therapist and psychologist so that mothers can get quality treatments irrespective of her location

Data is the new life in Information Technology. There are several solutions that use predictive analysis to get a result set used in future analysis. The internet, for example, has become an increasingly important tool for parents, especially for Millennial mothers. According to pewResearch, 80% of mothers between 23 – 45 years go online in search of answers or support from other mothers. Three-quarters of online parents use Facebook, as do 70% of non-parents. Mothers are more likely to use Facebook than fathers, with 81% of moms and 66% of dads using the platform. Millennial mothers now have Instagram accounts where they post pre/post natal pictures. 

Early symptoms of depression/anxiety can be detected when there are changes in the user's online pattern and presence. When depressed, people unconsciously act differently. Their engagement increases/decreases, and their night time spent on the internet also increases as they may not be able to sleep because they are disturbed.

Machine learning algorithms can take in a combination of self provided data as well as passive data from smartphones/social media to determine whether an episode is imminent for a mother. There are key indicators as to whether an episode is imminent. These crises can be predictable if we can detect a pattern of stress, isolation, or exposure to triggers. MaMa-X uses machine learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to fully harness prediction of the onset of mental and mood disorder. Our models will gather unstructured data sets from different data points and using the semi-supervised learning approach, the application will detect anomalies in patterns.

For example, if a mother’s day is usually such that she spends an average of 6hours on the internet every day, visit 1 or 2 instagram pages, read blogs and at night, her phone is not active (this is an assumption that she may be asleep), MaMa-X learns this patterns. Now if she increases/decreases her average time on the internet over a period of time and/or she is engrossed googling mental health symptoms and/or she start liking and commenting frequently on posts related to depression/anxiety, these triggers are picked up and MaMa-X starts sending her helpful mental tips and encouragement, She will be advised to take the mental exercise at least once a day. She will also get friendly chats to distract her when she is online searching mental illness symptoms.

With funds from this prize, we hope to expand this project for teenagers and young adults. Depression has become alarmingly high among the youths. Secondly, we hope to have partnerships with certified and experienced mental therapists so that users can have audio and video session with these therapists. Also, as part of future plans, these audios and videos will be used as inputs into our datasets. This mobile app will provide realtime analysis for the specialist to observe disturbance triggers in voice (such as pitch level, curse words, etc).

One of Bill & Melinda Gates foundation’s missions is to empower women to live a healthy life. Quoting B & M Gates foundation, “when you invest in a woman’s health and empowerment, it has a ripple effect, helping families, communities, and countries achieve long-lasting benefits.”

A woman’s mental health is key for her to properly care for her child and family. She can’t give what she doesn’t have. If she feels unloved, dejected or even suicidal, these traits are unconsciously passed to the people around her, including her baby. 

MaMa-X has been specifically designed for women. The mental exercises are structured such that women feel the energy boost and love from within.

Depression is a major public health problem that is supposedly twice as common in women during the childbearing age as it is in men. It accounts for the greatest burden of disease among all mental health problems, and it is expected to become the second most prevalent of all general health problems globally by 2020.

And unfortunately, ante/postpartum depression has not been given the ultimate attention it requires. 1 in 4 women suffer in silence and will rather go online to get help. The problem worsens if they stumble on a website or post with wrong information.

With this prize, we hope to expand this project to have partnerships with certified and experienced mental therapists so that users can have audio and video session with these therapists. This will help mothers who do not have access to mental health services or do not have the time to visit a therapist or psychologist get the necessary help she needs at very affordable cost.