WA startup develops smarter parenting app

Imagine typing ‘why has my three-year old stopped talking?’ into your phone and having an artificially intelligent program consider your family’s and child’s personal circumstances, guide you through a series of questions, and provide suggestions.

A Claremont-based startup has developed an app to help families record, analyse and report information about their child’s development, which they can then use to gain better insights, as well as share data with health and education providers.

Called Kindom, the app has been developed by KinChip Systems directors Gry Stene and Catherine Resnick, who have turned to crowdfunding site Indiegogo with an initial target of raising $US50,000 to bring their product to market.

The two businesswomen, who have backgrounds in software engineering and child psychotherapy respectively, are hoping to garner support from parents who can provide feedback on the app and also raise funds to speed up the development of the app’s artificial intelligence capabilities used in Apple’s Siri and Google Now programs.

Ms Resnick said there was a large market for the app, as one in six children had a developmental disability such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, hearing loss or intellectual disabilities, with many more going undiagnosed.

She said while many parents had access to help such as speech pathologists and tutors, these services were often siloed and parents could wait months for specialist appointments.

“For many parents waiting for a diagnosis they feel there is not much they can do. In one case, a desperate father brought in a suitcase of files (after finally getting a specialist appointment),” Ms Resnick said.

Kindom was developed to address these gaps in communication between separate services and to give parents a way to better monitor and help their children’s development, she said.

“It helps parents to effectively communicate with healthcare and education providers; it informs decision making and, importantly, it links parents with resources from quality providers with information relevant to their child’s needs,” Ms Resnick said.

Ms Stene said the app worked by parents first inputting data about their child’s medical and educational experiences as well as regular activities, behaviour and interests, which would be securely housed in a cloud-based system.

Kindom then offers a three-tiered subscription model: a free version where parents can keep and access all data; a standard model likely to cost $50 per family per year, which provides more analytic tools and data; and a premium model likely to cost $250 per year, which incorporates artificial intelligence, also known as cognitive technology, to help parents analyse and identify opportunities as early as possible.

Ms Stene said using cognitive technology allowed Kindom to offer suggestions to questions about sudden changes in behaviour or less pressing issues as, ‘What school is good for Jenny?’, based on accessing information already uploaded about where Jenny lives, her favourite school subjects, her interests, and her autism diagnosis.

“Say, for example, my three year old was developing normally but then has suddenly stopped talking. The app looks at all the data and it says ... that could be because a new baby was born, it could be because dad’s in a new job and he’s really stressed. It could be something more serious, it could be autism spectrum disorder,” she said.

“So it asks questions related to that and looks at the data that you’ve collected such as is he doing repetitive behaviours as well as not speaking. It would say these are the things we’ve seen, do you think it’s this? And then you can narrow it down yourself.”

Ms Stene said KinChip Systems was in discussions with IBM to develop the cognitive technology behind the app.

“You get all that knowledge, you curate it and you actually train it to answer questions based on your own data that you’ve collected,” she said.

Rather than seek private equity or business investment, Ms Ressnick said the partners had made a strategic decision to tap potential customers for funding.

“We’re really passionate about getting parents involved as early as possible so they can inform the development of the platform ... by getting that information early we can make minor tweaks in the beginning stage to make improvements whereas if we waited that might be a lot harder and more expensive later,” she said.

“The idea of crowdfunding is to get market validation, both on the product and the subscription model, as well as start those conversations and get parents involved.”

Ms Ressnick said in initial market tests parents had said they would prefer to pay for the product and feel they were more in control of their child’s personal information, rather than the app be commercially sponsored and potentially perceived as being open to industry interference.

Supporters can go to https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kindom-the-smarter-parenting-app# to donate to Kindom’s Indiegogo campaign, which closes in 30 days.