Why we founded BlueSkeye
Why we founded BlueSkeye
Content warning: contains reference to suicide.
Around 1 in 5 women experience a perinatal mental health problem during pregnancy or within the early postnatal years.
70% will hide or underplay their illness.
Suicide is the leading cause of direct maternal death within a year of having a baby.
Three reasons, BlueSkeye Founding CEO, Prof Michel Valstar gave, in a recent interview ahead of the company’s recognition as Digital Leaders’ Emerging Tech of the Year, for setting up BlueSkeye AI in 2019. (see accompanying video)
Prof Valstar has been working on face and voice analysis for over 18 years, latterly at the University of Nottingham, and is one of the leading experts in Affective Computing (AC) and Social Signal Processing (SSP) with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, cited over 16,000 times. Valstar and his team’s research underpins BlueSkeye’s world leading technology.
BlueSkeye uses machine learning to determine facial muscle actions, gaze direction, and tone of voice.
Depression causes changes to the face and voice (muscle retardation). By getting mums and mums to be, to use our software once or twice a week BlueSkeye can detect changes over time in this expressive behaviour. Such changes can indicate problems with mental health and allow sufferers to give their Doctors better, more objective and more reliable, information.
In the Summer of 2021 BlueSkeye launched a health and wellbeing app, Avocado, which engages mums to be in interactive tasks in order to automatically assess and respond to mood changes during their fertility, pregnancy and postpartum journeys. It has been used by over 200,000 women so far.
BlueSkeye is currently running a clinical trial with the NHS and the University of Nottingham for its software that helps mums and their doctors to better measure and manage maternal mental health.
According to Prof Valstar,
“About 1 in 5 women suffer from poor perinatal mental health and the burden on the NHS is about £1.2 billion a year. 70% of women underplay the severity of their mental health problems, and suicide, directly after giving birth is still the number one cause of death for women.
Our technology directly addresses this major problem by being able to intervene early, with objective repeatable measures of poor mental health.
Our technology will save lives.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing perinatal mental health problems and you are looking for help, the maternal Mental Health Alliance has published a list of sources of help.
