Backed by Radical Ventures and AI luminary Yoshua Bengio, Montreal company is partnering with leading children's hospitals to detect medical anomalies in baby cries

Ubenwa Health has launched today a new clinical study in collaboration with the Rivers State University Teaching Hospital in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The new study is aimed at validating the capability of Ubenwa’s technology to rapidly identify the onset of neurological injury in neonates.

When I discovered, six years ago, that we could screen for birth asphyxia using AI and the mic on a smartphone, I knew we had the potential of offering swift and reliable screening tools for one of the top 3 causes of newborn mortality today. Birth asphyxia yet causes over 2 million deaths and disabilities every year.

We are excited to announce that Ubenwa is one of only 35 ventures selected among over 2600 entrants to participate in the MIT Solve 2020-2021 social entrepreneurship program. As a Solver team in the Maternal and Newborn Health Challenge, we were awarded a grant of $10k USD.

Ubenwa's journey of building clinically-backed, low-cost diagnostic tools for newborns is a long one! Last year we received ethics board approval to launch our clinical trial in Nigeria and Canada. We are now gathering the largest database of clinically-annotated infant cries with real patients. As we begin the new year, we would like to share some of the major milestones of 2019 and our plans for 2020.

Ubenwa Health was recognized by the World Health Organisation as one of top 30 healthcare innovators emerging from Africa.

At Ubenwa, we set for ourselves the task of addressing the problem of perinatal asphyxia - one of the top 3 causes of newborn mortality today. We are applying machine learning to detect this breathing deficiency using only the infant cry as input. This has enabled us to develop an extremely cost-effective tool - a smartphone app - that is accurate and fast. I encountered first-hand the problem of asphyxia during the years I spent volunteering with Enactus and Fisher Foundation in Nigeria. The journey to develop, test and clinically validate Ubenwa has been exciting but difficult most of the time, with many lessons learned. I would like to take the chance of a new year to look back, reflect on how far Ubenwa has come and take a peek at where we are headed.

Ubenwa is one of 30 teams that have qualified for the 3rd round of AI XPrize competition. [Update: The Ubenwa team voluntarily exited the AI XPrize as of June 6, 2019.]

This month, Ubenwa Founder Charles Onu gave a talk on the show - This Week in Machine Learning and AI (TWiML). You can listen here.

Charles presented Ubenwa at the Montreal AI Symposium. Watch here and Innocent pitched Ubenwa at ITU Telecom World in Busan, South Korea.