SAN ANTONIO – A new app aims to make pregnancy safer by using artificial intelligence to identify potential risks, through the use of machine learning techniques.
Retired Army veteran Dave Esra recently launched a new app called BobiHealth.
“The idea is to improve maternal health outcomes, with predictive analytics,” Dave Esra, the founder and CEO of Bobihealth said. “We are collecting temperature, blood pressure, oxygen, and pulse.”
Maternal health is a topic that resonates deeply with Esra.
“My wife also had a complicated pregnancy, so I had a personal, passion behind it,” Esra said.
Esra pursued AI studies at MIT and continued his postgraduate education at the University of Texas in Austin.
“I did a postgrad course at UT Austin, and it was there that I was challenged with solve a problem with artificial intelligence. To me, it was obvious,” Esra said.
The World Health Organization reports that in 2020 almost 800 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and children.
“Ultimately, they have a wearable of some kind where we’re able to take biometrics throughout the day. And, we can collect those biometrics and identify as symptoms or self-identified symptoms and predict, like, okay, well, maybe this condition exists and give them information,” Esra said.
Esra said his son and wife are healthy.
“Users will benefit from their own data. So the data that they, put in, through their phones, their smartphones or wearables, we can take that data and use it, using machine learning models predict adverse events like pre-eclampsia, infection, blood clots, mental health issues,” Esra said.
Through the app, he hopes to continue to help families.
“We have the technology today to solve for this. To me, it’s not an issue of when or how. It is a we must solve for this,” Esra said.