Building Materai: a maternal health tool for parents and clinicians

Materai launched as a product in November 2025, so we had been building it for just over two years when I wrote this. Here, I want to explain what we aimed to do, where we went wrong in our first year, and what conversations with the people most affected by the problem, midwives, taught us.

Short version: we started by building the wrong thing, then found the right one. The longer story is more interesting.

Where the idea began

Claire and I came to this through health informatics and digital health product work. I spent several years creating patient-facing tools in the UK health system, where I repeatedly saw the same unresolved gap: the time between clinical appointments. Clinicians work hard to make each contact count. Between contacts, patients are largely left on their own.

Maternal health shows this gap particularly clearly. A standard low-risk pregnancy includes roughly ten antenatal appointments over nine months. That gives ten data points, while a great deal happens between them. Blood pressure may shift meaningfully, foetal movement patterns change, and symptoms develop. None of this history is captured systematically.

Claire brought the clinical perspective. Her background is in clinical informatics, including health data pipelines for NHS-adjacent systems and detailed knowledge of antenatal care pathways. Mapping the information gap together, we saw that the problem was not complex, only unaddressed. No one had created a lightweight daily check-in that built a useful clinical record without burdening parents with clinical content.

What we built first, and why it failed

Our first version tried to cover too much. Parents had to log a lot, review detailed visualisations, and track trends across several health measures. It worked technically, but very few people used it consistently.

The feedback was consistent: "It feels like a medical device" and "I feel like I'm doing something wrong if I miss a day." Both comments pointed to the same issue. We had made a clinical obligation, not a daily habit. Obligations are abandoned, while habits endure.

We spent most of the second half of 2024 reconsidering the core interaction. The question was: what is the smallest amount of information that, recorded consistently, becomes genuinely useful? Not comprehensive or clinically complete, just useful over time to a parent and their midwife.

We settled on three to four daily questions, designed to take under three minutes, with visuals focused on reassurance rather than complexity. Movement, symptoms, how you feel. That is the core. Everything else is optional context.

The provider side needed its own design

From the start, Materai was intended as a two-sided tool: a daily check-in for parents and a clinical view for providers. The direction was right, but getting the execution right took time.

Early conversations with midwives showed that they did not need a copy of the parent experience. They did not want every daily entry for every patient. They wanted signals: which patients had data to review before the next appointment, and which patterns justified a phone call this week rather than waiting for the visit?

The provider dashboard we built around this insight is an alert layer, not a data lake. Midwives see patients with flagged patterns worth attention, rather than a wall of raw data that must be interpreted before it becomes useful. The principle was simple: show the signal, not the noise.

Earlier this year, we ran a 12-patient pilot with a small group of community midwives. It is a very small sample, so we are careful not to claim more than it supports. It showed that a condensed view of the previous four weeks, available at the start of an appointment, made the opening conversation more focused and clinically useful. Less time was spent rebuilding history from memory, and more on what mattered for that visit.

What we still get wrong

For a meaningful proportion of parents, daily logging falls away after the initial period. We have not solved that. Consistent users get the most value, but maintaining that consistency throughout pregnancy is difficult, particularly for people who feel well and have no specific concerns.

We also have not fully resolved how to give parents useful information without increasing anxiety. A foetal movement count lower than yesterday's can be normal variation. Without clinical context, however, comparing daily logs can make normal variation feel alarming. We have worked on how information is presented, but this remains an open design challenge.

For providers, we are still learning where alert sensitivity thresholds should sit. Too sensitive, and midwives receive notifications that do not require action. Too conservative, and the tool fails to surface the patterns it should. Finding the balance needs more clinical input than we have had so far, which is why expanding our network of clinical partners is a priority for 2026.

What we are, and what we are not

Materai is not a medical device and does not diagnose. It does not tell parents whether a reading or symptom is clinically significant. It creates a record and surfaces patterns, while qualified clinicians interpret that record.

This is a product decision, not a hedge or disclaimer. We believe a pregnancy logging tool should provide an information layer that improves clinical conversations, not replace clinical judgement. We take that boundary seriously because it is right for users, and because crossing it would damage the trust with clinicians on which the provider side depends.

We are trying to make the 29 days between antenatal appointments a little less opaque for both the parent living through them and the midwife responsible for their care. It is a modest, deliberate goal. We are two people with a small team, learning as we go, in a field where mistakes carry serious consequences.

If you are a midwife, practice manager, or parent who has used the product, we would genuinely like to hear what works and what does not. This is not finished. It is a version we plan to keep improving.