Every pregnancy has a story. It begins with antenatal visits, tests and scans, and continues through monitoring, consultations, and labour. As that journey progresses, the amount of clinical information grows – and for healthcare professionals, quickly understanding the full picture can become challenging.
At CareMother by Doto Health, we have seen this challenge closely: every two minutes, a woman dies from preventable pregnancy or childbirth complications.
Our journey began with a simple goal: to make maternal and foetal monitoring more accessible, detect risk early and help healthcare professionals make better clinical decisions.
Before the UNICEF Venture Fund investment, CareMother had served more than 1 million mothers and supported over 2 million tests.
Why we’re building
We believe that empowering healthcare providers and frontline workers with technology can reduce the risk of mortality and morbidity. Sustainable Development Goal 3.1 aims to reduce maternal mortality to fewer than 70 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030. The world is still far from this goal. In 2023, the global maternal mortality ratio was 197 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Yet many maternal deaths can be prevented with access to high-quality care throughout pregnancy, childbirth and the period after birth. The challenge is often not whether a risk can be identified, but whether it is identified early enough and acted upon in time.
This is where technology can play a role – not by replacing clinical judgment, but by helping make important information easier to capture, understand and act upon. With support from UNICEF Femtech Ventures, we are building an AI solution to help healthcare professionals navigate complex maternal health information more easily.
Our work brings together two capabilities under one vision: making clinical information clearer, more structured and easier to interpret.
- AI-powered maternal case summarization: during pregnancy, a woman may have multiple visits, tests, scans, medications and monitoring reports. This information can be spread across different records, making it difficult and time-consuming for healthcare professionals to get the full picture quickly. Our AI-powered maternal case summarization solution brings relevant information together into one structured view. It helps highlight the mother's medical history, current condition, important changes and key events, making it easier to understand the patient's journey at a glance. This can be especially useful during clinical reviews, referrals and shift handovers.
- Rule-based cardiotocography/non-stress test classification engine: fetal monitoring helps healthcare professionals assess a baby’s wellbeing during pregnancy and labour. Interpreting these monitoring traces requires experience and careful review of different patterns. Our engine applies defined criteria from established international clinical guidelines to classify the monitoring pattern into clinically recognized categories – such as normal, suspicious and pathological – to help categorize fetal monitoring traces in a transparent and consistent way.
Building AI for the real world
AI solutions in the medical or healthcare domains do not just involve innovation, they demand clinical validation, strong adherence to regulation and must fit into existing clinical workflows.
The primary consideration is not whether a solution incorporates AI, but whether the deployed technology effectively addresses four core imperatives: (1) saving lives through actionable, high-precision insights; (2) fostering access and equity across underserved populations; (3) supporting clinicians by optimizing, rather than disrupting, care delivery; and (4) strengthening medical infrastructure to sustain high-quality care.
Why open source?
No one in the world should have to suffer simply because they do not have access to quality healthcare. This belief is at the heart of why we are building and why we believe in making technology more accessible through open-source approaches.
The partnership with UNICEF is an opportunity to take this vision further: using technology and AI to improve access, strengthen healthcare systems and contribute to better outcomes for mothers and children, regardless of where they live.
