- The Soula app has an AI chatbot, Dua, that helps mothers with postpartum depression support.
- AI chatbots like Dua aim to reduce healthcare burden and improve mental health accessibility.
- OB/GYN experts said they welcome innovation in AI to destigmatize questions about pregnancy.
Caring for a one-month-old newborn and two-year-old son felt overwhelming for LeRonika Francis.
During her first postpartum period, Francis said she experienced a severe wave of depression while dealing with a colic baby. In the end she sought the help of a counselor. It wasn’t until her most recent pregnancy that she also started using an AI-powered chatbot on the fem-tech app Soula, which she said helped reduce symptoms of depression and reassure her about her mental health.
“He tells me: “Welcome, LeRonika. Your reactions are natural,” said Francis, who is based in New Iberia, Louisiana.
The AI chatbot called “Dua” also sent her some videos she could watch about self-hugging, a practice that can reduce stress levels.
“I feel like Dua is there more than anything. That really showed me: OK, this is what you can do. Make sure you take time for yourself too, because that’s important too,” Francis said.
Soula was co-founded by Natallia Miranchuk and Andrei Kulik, who envisioned a 24/7 AI doula that could close the gap in mental health support for mothers during the pregnancy and postpartum periods. Rather than replacing medical providers, apps like Soula aim to increase broader access to maternal health care. Health care providers said these apps could also help reduce the burden on the health care system, where wait times can be long and workers face burnout.
Business Insider spoke to OB/GYN doctors and doulas, who largely welcomed the rise of AI chatbots because they can make information more accessible to patients.
According to data obtained from Sensor Tower, Soula now has more than 35,000 downloads. The startup has raised over $750,000 in funding and is backed by investors like Andrey Mikhaylyuk, former vice president of product at Flo Health, a period tracking app.
Miranchuk told BI that her experiences as a single mother of two and her work as a former maternity photographer inspired her to develop a support app for women. Originally conceived as a hub to connect doulas around the world with those in need, the generative AI boom shifted the startup’s focus to integrating a chatbot that could serve more populations.
“Women are ashamed to ask questions, even in the community, because they feel that maybe ‘as a mother I should know this, but I don’t. And she doesn’t know where to go,” said Miranchuk.
ChatGPT’s ease of customization has fueled a wave of new AI-based chats like Soula. According to Sensor Tower, companion apps Character.ai, Talkie and Paradot have more than 73 million collective downloads, growing more than 130% between 2023 and 2024. AI therapy applications such as Wysa AND Woebot received over 1 million downloads, the data said.
Corenia Smith, director of the Minnesota East Justice Collaborative, said that while popularizing tools like chatbots can help expand health care access, it’s important to avoid a “one size fits all” and ensure that AI can reflect the communities it serves.
“There are cultural practices that exist and have existed for thousands of years that people still use,” Smith said. “A human can talk about their whole experience and what they’ve seen and make referrals. When you reach that limitation with an AI, it has to have the ability to deliver care or make a referral in a way where people they don’t. feel down.”
The role of a doula
The AI chatbot Dua aims to function as a doula, providing mothers with information about the pregnancy experience during a transition period.
Doulas are trained professionals who can provide non-medical, ongoing physical, emotional and informational support to women before, during and after childbirth, helping to reduce maternal mental health morbidity and mortality. baby.
Access to a doula can be expensive. While there is Medicaid coverage for doulas in some states, not all private health insurance plans cover these expenses. Long waiting times and socioeconomic inequality also contribute to increased levels of stress and underutilization of health care among pregnant mothers and people.
“Traditionally, it’s been something that’s only been available to people with a lot of money and a lot of resources. The people who benefit most from doula care are those who may not trust the health care system,” said Dr. Devon Rupley, an attending physician and OB/GYN specialist at NYC Health. “These tend to be people of color who have had prior negative experiences with racism and prejudice that can really hurt their experience in the health care system in general.”
Rupley added that using an AI healthcare application to address basic questions can allow patients to spend higher quality time with doctors asking high-level questions and discussing their healthcare issues.
Dua is the built-in AI chatbot of the Soula app. Sula
How to design an empathetic AI chatbot
Soula enlisted real-life doulas to help train her chatbot and strike the right tone.
“We can’t make it as pleasant as talking to a real-life person, but we can try to make it as close as possible,” said Lexi Pacheco, a doula from Arizona who worked to help refine the dialogue in Soula’s. chatbot I want. For $22 an hour, she helped improve the chatbot by using it hands-on during pregnancy, adding her expertise.
While asking questions on Google might yield more informative answers, Pacheco said mothers would want something that offered “more of that assurance that Google wouldn’t.”
For Armani Grant, a Soula user who became pregnant at 18, Google felt overwhelmed. The chatbot allowed her to ask questions she wouldn’t feel comfortable asking her mother.
Pacheco said many women she has worked with reported similar experiences.
“They may even feel unable to ask the question, which no woman should ever have to feel, but with my history of working with people, they definitely tend to come back to: Excuse me, I’m asking this question for some reason, and it can only be because of the social pressure that the most medicated doctors have put on people who don’t give us the time and day,” said Pacheco.
The app is not intended to completely replace a doula. Additionally, retention rates for AI healthcare chatbots can be low, said Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University. High abandonment rates for healthcare apps are “an elephant in the room,” he said.
At the same time, Pacheco said AI robots can help “calm nerves” and fill in the gaps when patients feel they are “bothering” their healthcare providers.
“AI is not like a health care provider to give you instructions, but it’s supposed to be there to give you a little more comfort,” Pacheco said.