LatchAid: A Smart, Accessible, and Scalable Solution to Support Women’s Breastfeeding and Early Motherhood Journey

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The breastfeeding support sector has been paralysed by COVID-19\. Face-to-face support can barely reach mothers due to social distancing measures. Postnatal support from the NHS staff, commissioned support is reduced to minimum, mainly phone-calls / leaflets. Breastfeeding peer-to-peer support groups were shut-down nationwide, with few replaced by on-line meetings. A UK-wide survey shows 81% of women felt they were not getting sufficient breastfeeding support due to social distancing measures; 75.3% felt isolated; and 58.2% felt their breastfeeding journey was negatively impacted because of COVID-19\.The UK already had the worst breastfeeding rate globally. The pre-existing breastfeeding support system was patchy, unscalable, and reliant on face-to-face delivery. Research shows 90% of mothers gave up breastfeeding before they wanted to. Top challenges mothers faced are: lack of health professional support (57%), pain, health issues (55.8%), and feeling of isolation/depression (46.1%).Using digital solutions to deliver breastfeeding education and support is urgently needed. LatchAid's Beta mobile app has been co-designed/co-developed with top infant-feeding experts and commended as a revolutionary, much-needed innovation by users across 6 continents. This project aims to expand/enhance our R&D in four game-changing areas to deliver personalised, accessible, 24/7 digital breastfeeding education/support/communities at scale.1. **Accurate, Diverse 3D Breastfeeding Animations and Augmented Reality** - enable users to interactively, immersively learn vital breastfeeding positions/skills from 3D animated characters in anatomical views, flexible camera angles, and AR mode. Virtual characters have customisable breast shapes/sizes, skin colours for inclusion and diversity.2. **Scalable, Robust, 24/7 Virtual Breastfeeding Support Groups** - digitally replicate real-life peer-to-peer support groups accompanied by qualified experts. We will focus on scaling the system to manage thousands of virtual support groups globally, concurrently by leveraging human experts and virtual supporters powered by Artificial Intelligence. This also includes automatic moderation; automatic escalation for physical/emotional issues detected in conversations; and AI/virtual supporter's ability to discern users' intents with sensitively-worded/evidence-based responses.3. **Comprehensive AI Knowledge Base** - we are evolving a deep neural network to cover breastfeeding, infant-care, and maternal health domain knowledge to answer users' questions 24/7 via an interactive chatbot.4. **Personalised AI-based Virtual Supporter** - models a variety of virtual supporter persona (i.e. fixer, empathy) to interact with different users differently based on their needs, personalities.Breastfeeding organisations, professionals severely disrupted by COVID-19 pandemic can resume service delivery using LatchAid as a remote support tool. LatchAid's AI virtual supporter can triage and resolve over 80% of users' questions/concerns using neural networks. More complex issues can then be handled by healthcare, breastfeeding support professionals digitally. These responses are used to train the AI virtual supporter to improve its effectiveness, robustness continuously. This innovation not only helps the breastfeeding support sector recover but also helps it transit to a digital new era where peer-to-peer and professional support can be delivered 24/7, at scale.Increased breastfeeding rates will bring significant socio-economic, environmental benefits by tackling health inequalities; improving immunity, well-being, and life expectancy of mothers and babies; and significantly decreasing costs, carbon emission from unnecessary hospital trips/treatments and from mass formula milk production, packaging, distribution, and consumption.