Videra Health, founded in 2019 by cofounders Brett Talbot, Loren Larsen and Mark Newman, released the first AI-powered postpartum screener on Sept. 23.
“‘Check on Mom’ is not just a digital tool; it is a public health resource,” said Loren Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Videra Health. “By showing what is possible with AI-powered video screeners, we are opening new opportunities for earlier detection and better outcomes, not just in maternal health but across conditions where timely screening can make a real difference for patients and providers.”
The screener was trained with hundreds of thousands of examples of postpartum depression, Larsen said, to make sure that it can detect the mental illness in the different ways it presents itself, analyzing both video and AI language models to suggest a doctor’s visit. The screener will not diagnose a patient.
It is available for free on the company’s website at checkonmom.ai. No insurance is needed.
This is the first test of the AI, and Larsen said the company was eager to release it and make a difference in helping mothers get the help they need quicker if they are experiencing postpartum depression.
“This is just an overlooked condition that has a big impact—not just on moms, but on kids too,” Larsen said. “When mom is depressed and not at her best, then kids suffer, and then society suffers. And so it’s a really big societal issue that if we know about it, we can do things about it.”
The technology used for the screener was developed at Larsen’s and Newman’s first company, HireVue, which specializes in analyzing videos of job candidates for ideal employer placement. Now, those nonverbal cues, such as a tone of voice, facial expressions and more that help employers hire, are translated into the medical field as a screener to find signs of postpartum depression.
He said the newly released screener is better than the average postpartum depression screening conducted currently in the medical field.
A standard postpartum depression screening, based on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scal, to check on a mother, usually isn’t conducted until six weeks after the birth of the baby and even then, Larsen said, it can feel hard to talk about.
“What we’ve really tried to do is take these really unpleasant, unfriendly, unempathetic screening tools and have you just have a conversation with an AI,” he said. “It talks about what’s been going on [and] it’s empathetic.”
Making it more like a conversation is showing promising results according to the AI training videos, Larsen said. He’s hopeful that AI will be incorporated into health care as more than just administrative assistance.
“AI would be really useful, and it’s been difficult to get health care to adopt it,” Larsen said.
“I think in the last six months, we’ve really seen health care shift,” he said. “I think that we’re just moving into things that are not just administrative, but really helping us make better health decisions.”