Researchers behind Hey Mama! have received a $25,000 Breakthrough Award from Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS), funding that will help them involve people with lived experience of pregnancy more directly in developing the application and work towards a proposed pilot at HHS.

Hey Mama! began as a course project about 18 months ago, when Vedha Thilagarajan started looking at the gaps in care that can follow childbirth, miscarriage or stillbirth. People may need physical or mental health support long after pregnancy, but the services available to them are spread across hospitals, public health programs and community organizations. Finding the right help is not always straightforward.

Thilagarajan, a PhD student in Health Research Methodology at McMaster University, is developing Hey Mama! under the supervision of Rohan D’Souza. The proposed AI-enabled platform would bring reliable health information, personalized guidance and connections to existing services into one place, helping people navigate care without replacing healthcare professionals.

An earlier $10,000 Mitacs grant allowed the team to engage with more than 35 stakeholders, while 17 undergraduate students contributed to the research and datasets behind different parts of the project. The researchers have also established partnerships with public health organizations in Hamilton and Huron-Perth, helping them understand how Hey Mama! might work alongside existing services.

The next stage will bring people with lived experience of pregnancy into the development process. A co-design meeting planned for November will involve participants from across Ontario, giving them an opportunity to question the team's ideas and identify what they would find most useful.

“We want to understand whether the needs and priorities we have identified through our research truly reflect their experiences,” Thilagarajan said. “What concerns matter most to them, and how do they envision the different components of Hey Mama! working together?”

Their input will inform further development of the application, alongside work to assess the reliability of its AI-supported information, the appropriateness of its responses, and how privacy and safety can be protected.

“There is a lot we still need to understand before something like Hey Mama! can be used in clinical care,” said D’Souza, Scientific Director of the FLOURISH Research Group and an associate professor in McMaster’s Departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. “We need to know whether people find it useful, whether they can trust the information it provides, and how well it works alongside the services already available to them. Those are questions we have to answer through research.”

The team hopes to pilot Hey Mama! at HHS, examining its usability, feasibility and accessibility in a healthcare setting. The findings would guide further improvements and help establish the evidence needed for future clinical evaluation and potential broader adoption.

Funding provided by Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) Research and HHS Foundation through the HHS Breakthrough Awards program.