While menopause can seem overwhelming for some, a new app founded in Montreal is hoping to use AI to help women navigate the experience.
Co-founders Nathalie Belanger, 56 and Elizabeth Wasserman, 50, were inspired by their own experience with menopause to create Ask Elina, an app aimed at making it easier for women to find helpful and accurate information on menopause tailored to their own needs.
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Both Belanger and her partner are seasoned executives. Belangeris a former vice-president at both Reitman’s retail company and Aeroplan, while Wasserman is the founder of dating platform Mate1.com, which has a global online community of over 50 million users.
The Ask Elina app uses Belong.Life’s patient AI mentor technology to ensure women get accurate health advice.
“Sometimes an AI will make things up. It’s called the hallucination, and the technology that Belong has uses medical safeguards. So it only uses verified information, so it doesn’t hallucinate,” Belanger says.
By using AI, she says, the app learns the more you use it, allowing for a more personalized approach to each user, factoring in that information it has already learned from them when giving advice or answering questions.
“The other really great thing about the technology that Belong developed is that you can change the tone of how Elina answers your questions. So we built her to really have lots of empathy and explain and give answers that feel like you’re really just chatting with your best friend as opposed to a doctor,” Belanger says.
She notes that the app is not meant to replace doctors but is meant to help women prepare and know the right questions to ask when they do see their doctor to help make the most of the appointment.
While they are still working out all the details, the company plans to offer a free version of the app and a paid-for option to try and make it accessible to all users.
