Ubenwa, a pioneering health tech startup that uses artificial intelligence to create accessible, clinical-grade infant monitoring tools, has secured $2.5 million in pre-seed funding to scale its operations.
Charles Onu, a Nigerian with expertise in the medical area and considerable practice in AI, is the founder of the startup company Ubenwa, which was established in 2017 and is located in Montreal. Onu’s knowledge in both fields contributed to the conception of the Ubenwa vision.
Why Is My Baby Crying?
Newborns often cry for two to three hours a day. Even if a crying baby is considered normal, it may be disturbing for both the newborn and the parents. Babies may cry for no apparent cause at times. But at other times, they’re attempting to communicate something to you via their tears.
Moreover, babies cry for a variety of causes, including hunger, exhaustion, when awake, or discomfort. But a baby’s cry may also be an indication that he or she needs more immediate medical attention.
According to, Charles Onu, Co-Founder, and CEO of Ubenwa pioneered the use of audio signal processing and machine learning to better comprehend newborn cry sounds.
“Ubenwa is building a diagnostic tool that understands when a baby’s cry is actually a cry for medical attention.” “Ultimately, our goal is to be a translator for baby cry sounds, providing a non-invasive way to monitor medical conditions everywhere you find a baby: delivery rooms, neonatal and paediatric intensive care units, nurseries, and in the home.”
Medical Anomalies in Infants Udenwa To The Rescue
While the cry of a newborn can be challenging for both clinicians and parents, it is necessary to be attentive to understand their plague.
As a result, a delayed diagnosis may have serious, long-term consequences, or even be deadly. Ubenwa has created precise algorithms for cry activity monitoring, acoustic biomarker recognition, and anomaly prediction, transforming newborn cries into clinically useful information and possible diagnosis.
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The company’s initial pilot on diagnosing neurological impairment caused by birth asphyxia demonstrated a 40% improvement over the APGAR rating, the most frequent physical test after delivery.
How Ubenwa AI works
The company, which has its headquarters in Montreal, listens to an infant’s cries in order to determine whether or not the child shows signs of having a neurological condition. Audio of crying is gathered from partner hospitals all over the world, and it is then sorted according to whether or not crying is considered normal or abnormal. From that information, the company is able to determine whether or not a child may be suffering from a potential disorder.
For the time being, the software that is powered by AI can only recognize the early warning signs of birth asphyxia, but it has the potential to determine learning milestones based on cry triggers. According to Onu, the company is working to develop the technology in the hopes that it will one day be able to diagnose congenital heart disease.
Those who use the app record when their baby cries and then get weekly summaries of patterns. If the app finds something wrong, it alerts the user and gives them information to share with doctors.
Onu’s explained that ” Today, doctors use physical assessment to look at eyelids, look at the skin tone, and so on and so forth,” Onu said. “If doctors are really worried it could be with an MRI or a brain MRI machine because that’s the ultimate standard, but we don’t live in an MRI machine every day. That is costly. With simple cry analysis, you can track neurological biomarkers on an ongoing basis, non-invasively.”
Ubenwa Partners
The technique that Ubenwa has created is founded on a body of scientific study that was carried out in close cooperation with Mila and six institutions located in three different countries, one of which being the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the Teaching Hospital at the Enugu State University in Nigeria, the Teaching Hospital at the Rivers State University in Nigeria, and the Santa Casa de Misericordia Hospital in Brazil.
The company has the most comprehensive and varied clinically annotated library of newborn cry sounds, which is critical for the creation of audio-based biomarkers.
Dr. Guilherme Sant’Anna, a neonatologist at Montreal Children’s Hospital and a professor at McGill University, provided more admiration for Ubenwa’s procedures while expressing her organization’s eagerness to partner with Ubenwa.
“Cry analysis has the potential to provide critical information for identifying babies with evolving brain problems,” she stated in the press release. “A non-invasive diagnostic tool of this nature would be a powerful clinical resource for paediatric medicine. We are thrilled to be collaborating with Ubenwa and realise this through well-controlled clinical studies.”
Ubenwa Funding
Radical Ventures led the $2.5 million pre-seed round for Jand Ubenwa, which also included returning investor AIX Ventures, entrepreneurs Richard Socher and Pieter Abbeel, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, Canadian politician Marc Bellemare, and Hugo Larochelle from Google Brain.
In conjunction with the fundraising collaboration, Ubenwa will welcome Sanjana Basu, an investor from Radical Ventures, to its board of directors. Basu has expressed optimism on the investment in Ubenwa. He has maintained that the market for digital products such as Ubenwa’s software solutions—mobile app and API—is still increasing.
“Supported by a strong clinical foundation, Ubenwa has developed a proprietary innovation for an underserved and important market,” Basu said. “Deciphering a baby’s cry using machine learning can open up a range of possibilities in the consumer and clinical pediatrics market where demand for better digital products is only growing.”
The Ubenwa App
Ubenwa is currently inviting parents and hospitals to become early users of its mobile application by registering on its platform as early adopters. According to Onu, the company will be able to gather comprehensive use-case data with the assistance of this private testing, which will then be also used to develop Ubenwa’s suite of software for analyzing infants’ cries.
Onu said that even though users will be able to record cries, those cries will not be saved. Instead, the cries will be analyzed and matched to their existing database.
Observation
Ubenwa is the first company to use AI and years of scientific research to create a sound-based automated diagnostic solution for babies.
Even though Ubenwa is its own company, it grew out of research that Onu’s team has been doing since 2017 in Mila, which is a world-famous AI hub in Quebec, Canada. But Ubenwa’s influence is felt in more places than just Canada. Through partnerships with top hospitals in Nigeria, Brazil, and Canada, Ubenwa asserts to have the largest and most varied database of clinically annotated baby cries.
Although Ubenwa’s primary focus is on the cries of infants, other companies are employing audio biometrics to assist in the diagnosis of a variety of conditions, typically in patients of a more mature age. StethoMe claims that they analyze the breath to diagnose conditions of the airways in children and then share this information with their physicians. In a similar manner, Ellipsis Health asserts that it can diagnose patients with depression by analyzing their voice biomarkers.