What to Expect When AI’s Expecting

A few decades ago, Ami Meoded spent his days ensuring that the Ninja Turtles and Dora The Explorer could set up shop in the Middle East. But after a career in a medium that far too often becomes a virtual babysitter for busy parents, he became increasingly concerned about how an ever-digitizing world could affect childhood development. With his background in marketing children’s products, Meoded seized an opportunity to co-found LittleOne.Care, a company that aims to use AI to further parents’ knowledge and promote sustained daily interaction in the areas where individual children need it the most. 

After years of research and beta tests, LittleOne.Care announced Elora, a groundbreaking baby monitor that uses A.I. to provide real-time data to parents so they can document trends and make the necessary interventions to ensure their children have every opportunity to thrive. Fresh from launching Elora in Nashville earlier this year, Meoded sat down with The Pamphleteer to talk about the challenges of parenting, public perceptions of AI, and Music City’s appeal for entrepreneurs in the childcare field. 

How did you get your start in the baby monitor arena?

I began my career developing content for babies. I was responsible for bringing Barney the dinosaur to Israel. Wherever I was, I was the head of the PTA. And I even set up a new elementary school. Somehow, I’ve always found myself close to the educational market and the care of babies. 

I also have a personal angle because my mom didn't want to raise me. Nowadays, we know that postpartum depression is something we should discuss–that we're aware of. We know how to treat it. But in the past, that was not clear. My aunt took me in. Every day, I think about what could have happened if she hadn’t. We now understand how the first two years of babies’ lives are crucial for their development, mental health, and well-being. Those first two years of life impact so many aspects. 

My business partner [Shauli Arieh] is a technological guy. He came to me with this idea because he knew that I was involved in marketing and developing baby products. So, he wanted to get my advice. After 10-15 meetings where I refused to charge him, I told him I’d like to set up the business with him.

We raised the money, and then COVID started. But because of the lockdowns, we had the opportunity to work with parents at home and conduct trials of our models. And we learned together. We didn't really develop the product at the beginning. We developed a community of parents and baby experts. Together, we defined what they needed from this product and how we could do it. And to this day, we still work with those parents. They give us expert feedback and are the most important product manager that you can have because they know what they need. This is the journey. It's been four years since we launched the product online and then in Nashville.

Why did you choose to launch a baby care product like Elora in Nashville?

Launching Elora in the Nashville area makes strategic sense for several reasons. Nashville is a rapidly growing city with a strong sense of community, making it ideal for generating word-of-mouth buzz around a baby care product.

The city is known for its diverse and young population, including many new families and parents who are likely to be early adopters of innovative baby products like Elora. Additionally, Nashville is home to a variety of events and gatherings where Elora can be showcased effectively, and the local healthcare infrastructure provides a supportive environment for collaborations with pediatricians and baby wellness specialists. By starting in a city that embodies growth, community, and family values, we can build a loyal customer base and establish a credible reputation before expanding nationwide.

What separates Elora from other baby monitors?

The most important part of the product is the AI we’ve developed. It is one of the most unique AI programs because it interprets the baby's motions, sounds, and voice. The product helps us understand the connection between the baby's crying and its larger context. We can synchronize the baby’s sounds and motions and interpret them for parents.

How are you navigating public perceptions of AI and how do you feel that your project demonstrates a use of AI that people haven't thought about before whenever they hear the term?

AI is not something new, but right now, it's trendy. We have made several unique technological breakthroughs with our AI, enabling us to have more effective neural networks to understand babies’ activities and sounds. People are more curious and increasingly ask themselves how to care for their baby and what they can do better.

We convert the sounds of the babies into an image. We cannot understand this image. But the sound, the voice, and the accelerations of Elora are actually converted into an image. AI works with these images. So, the moment it sees specific images, you can tell that the baby is crying because he's hungry and not because he's tired. We aim to enable both inexperienced and experienced parents and caregivers to better understand the comprehensive activities of their babies. 

Of course, we expect that the parents keep a diary through Elora of when they care for the baby. When they do that, they have an ability to learn a lot about the baby's day-to-day life and about their impact on the baby's routine. At the end of the day, babies only do four things: they sleep, they cry, they eat and they poop. That's it! In Africa, New Zealand, the U.S. and everywhere else. It’s the same. 

The problem is that the moment you become a caregiver, you are part of these scenarios. I'm sorry to say, but on many occasions, the parents are just interfering even though they have the option to improve their activity and routines.

When we present parents a report from Elora about, for example, how many words a baby said that day, parents understand that they may need to talk and sing to their baby more. Elora sends these reminders. This is what we do. 

AI is about the ability to collect data and to understand it in order to prevent and predict things that we couldn't before. Parents can start using Elora during pregnancy because it is the very first stage when you can define the well-being of the future newborn. 

How do you balance the usefulness of data with protecting the privacy of users?

We have a strict privacy policy. One, we have to tell our parents what we collect and why we collect it. That’s all in writing. We tell customers what we are using the data for and that we are not selling it or using it to advertise. You can delete your data, including your history. Our privacy policy is just as important as how we deal with radiation. This product does not radiate, unlike many other products. These policies are the foundation of our company.

Associatively, people think, “Oh, wow, my God, they are recording everything.” No, Elora, like any AI technology in this market, is based on activation words. You can say, “Okay, Google,” or “Hi, Siri,” or whatever. Our activation words are the baby's cry, your laughter, and so on. We do not know what you said, but we know a particular type of pitch is a reading pitch or singing pitch or talking pitch or screaming. We don’t have the ability to know what you said, but we know that you are talking to your baby.

Where did you get the name for the product?

We wanted to make the logo an elephant because elephants are unique animals. They live in communities. They protect their young. They have a very good memory, like Elora, which can remember everything from the time when a baby is born. They're very sensitive, and they hear from a great distance, exactly like Elora. 

Because of the logo, we were looking for a name that started with the letter “E”. The very first baby girl who used our products in the US was from Texas, and her name was Elora. She was part of the alpha trial and the beta trial in the early adopter program. We thought that it would be quite symbolic to name the product after the very first baby girl who used it. And it started with “E” just like “elephant.”

Will Elora remain available online and at independent maternity stores or do you plan to expand to big box retailers?

Elora is not just a product that you sell. The moment you purchase Elora, you introduce yourself to a community of baby experts who are waiting for you within the application. Anytime you click on an event like when the baby cries, when it falls asleep, or when you last spoke to the baby, you get a pop-up with a tip from an expert on that event and your baby's age. It’s like a real-time Wikipedia of what will happen with your baby during the next couple of months or years. 

We are trying to create a community of experts for parents in every region once we have more products in use. And in every city, we want to start a competition for parents. For instance, New York against Nashville, Baltimore against Salt Lake City. We will decide that this week, the competition between Buffalo and Rochester is who talks more to their babies in that specific community. However, we do not want to create competition between individuals. We found out that some of the parents can take it personally.

The idea is to create awareness. Talk to your baby, sing to your baby, play with your baby. In many houses, people do not play with their babies. The World Health Organization complains that we are not playing with our children enough, and this is the main reason we have overweight kids in elementary school. We would like to use these competitions to increase awareness and create a community that is led by local baby experts. We sell the product online and with independent retailers. We sell the product on Amazon. We have an affiliate program that moms, dads, and baby experts can join because they use Elora and have experience as part of these communities.

What other products besides the monitor are you developing now?

We plan to add a camera, but the problem with that is it's stuck in one place. So, we are working on a product inspired by smartwatch technology that goes with the baby anywhere. It will be able to also track the baby's safety. If anything happens when the baby is sleeping at night, we already handle that. But a baby can fall from a changing table in a daycare. A baby can receive aggressive care or be shaken.

We talk about kidnapping. We talk about babies forgotten in the car in hot seasons. But nobody really talks much about shaken baby syndrome. $1.3 billion of government funds annually goes to [caring for victims of abusive head trauma]. A child can be shaken when the caregiver loses their mind for just a second because the baby will not stop crying.

The moment something shakes Elora, parents will immediately receive a notification. We learned that the moment people see a baby with Elora, they automatically change their attitude, although they are mostly good people. If you’re using a cup that Queen Elizabeth I used to drink from, you will be more careful with it. 

The whole idea is to create an umbrella of safety features in the car, outdoors, in the daycare, and even when you go out or your baby is with your mother-in-law. Both when you're around and when you are not around. The ability to be with the baby 24/7 enables us to also track the air quality around the baby. Right now, we don’t have cameras with our products because we want to figure out the privacy concerns first. 

We’ve also added a new feature to Elora. Parents can simply touch Elora and speak to leave a note. For example, they might say, "Changed diaper, it was wet," "First time eating a banana," or "Grandma just arrived." All of these notes are recorded in the app as part of the baby diary. This effortless and intuitive method ensures consistent use of the baby diary without any hassle.

Baby experts can now join the LittleOne.Care app for free, allowing parents to communicate and chat with them directly using their baby's data for more personalized advice. We also now have "Baby GPT.” This new feature is currently available to a select group of parents and testers. It allows parents to interact directly with our AI engine to receive personalized answers to any questions they have about their baby. The responses and push notifications are tailored to each family as the AI considers the specific question and integrates it with the baby's detailed long-term data and life events.

More information about Elora is available at LittleOne.Care’s website.