Parent Sense founder Meg Faure and chief operational officer Tové de Chazal Gant tell Natasha Baluchi about their app, which is designed to provide personalised guidance about little ones
WHEN occupational therapist and author Meg Faure first launched her business, a digital parenting and baby care app, the world was in the midst of lockdown.
Parents were cut off from their wider family, friends and the support networks they would have normally relied on. New parents faced an overwhelming amount of often conflicting advice online.
Meg’s career had always centred on maternal mental health and early childhood development, leading her to ask a simple question: if parents were overwhelmed by the disparate advice on the internet, why not bring trusted guidance together in one place?
Launching into a digital era
Six years later, her app – Parent Sense – has become a global digital platform, with a team of 15, located in Jersey, partnering with health organisations in the Island and overseas. The app provides personalised guidance on babies’ sleep, feeding, development and health, alongside expert advice tailored to each child’s age and stage up to five years old.
Recently, with the backing of a £100,000 grant from the government’s Impact Jersey programme, the company launched the app for Jersey families at no cost.
“Sadly, we’ve lost our village as parents,” Meg said.
“Historically, mums had their mother, mother-in-law and extended families. We’ve lost that in the digital world, and we have lost it extensively in Jersey, because a lot of us are expats and living here without our networks,” she continued.
As a trained occupational therapist specialising in infant care, Meg previously owned a clinical practice in South Africa, writing eight parenting books – two of which are bestsellers – before selling her business. Later on, she decided to return to entrepreneurship to develop Parent Sense.
Chief operational officer Tové de Chazal Gant also moved to Jersey from South Africa after working in medical insurance, the charity sector and then running her own business.
The pair met through a personal connection, when Tové sought guidance about one of her children with additional needs.
“The relationship kind of blossomed from there, and we became friends after we relocated to Jersey,” said Tové.
For both women, their decisions to relocate to the Island were initially driven by business considerations and after evaluating a range of jurisdictions, they both settled on Jersey as the ideal choice.
“We were looking for digital- and startup-friendly environments,” Meg said. “Jersey has a high regulation and governance, meaning it is very respected globally, so it’s easier building a technology company and looking to scale internationally.”
Factors such as being an English-speaking place, its central time-zone and “the beauty and the beaches”, were also considered by Tové.
“It was the right home for us as families but also for the product,” Meg said.
A new approach
Parent Sense originally operated as a subscription app marketed directly to parents, but rising digital customer acquisition costs after the pandemic prompted the business to rethink the model.
“The price of acquiring digital customers became very expensive. We needed to find a partner in the middle who could help us make sure that parents could use it for free,” Meg explained. “Now we have partnerships with people who are mission aligned, to actually deliver something of quality and preventative health.”
In Jersey, that role is being played by Impact Jersey whose “mandate was to look at impactful projects that could become sustainable”.
The funding has supported the technical integration needed to tailor the app for Jersey, alongside marketing, stakeholder engagement and day-to-day operations.
“We don’t want mums to have six apps on their phone. That’s why we have put it all into one app,” Tové said proudly. “It’s very important for us to get in front of as many parents as possible. There’s a huge focus on us making sure we are at all the events, talking to all the experts and charities in the Island.”
The Impact Jersey grant, they say, has helped them do just that.
Technology tailored to every family
While using the app, parents enter details about their baby from birth, allowing the platform to provide personalised guidance based on the child’s age, development and individual needs.
“One of the biggest challenges of early parenting is cognitive overwhelm,” Meg said.
“There’s a lot of information that’s uncurated and not personal to your baby. The idea was to deliver very personal content to the mum and baby, where and when she needed it.
“The best way was through a digital product, because you can use algorithms and AI to deliver personalised information about that baby.”
The app tracks developmental milestones, provides feeding and sleep guidance and reminds parents about healthcare appointments such as vaccinations. Additionally, it suggests age-appropriate activities, recipes and play ideas.
Adapted for Jersey families, the platform delivers tailored information for Islanders. However, you can access the platform worldwide, if you pay a subscription.
“On the app, it will say at six months in ‘don’t forget your child needs to go to get their vaccine’. That is based on Jersey’s vaccine schedule,” explained Tové. “We want to make sure it’s a Jersey digital product.”
The duo also work with charities, healthcare professionals and other governing bodies to integrate local resources into the platform.
The use of AI in an evolving world
A particular feature of Parent Sense is AI integration, where a 24/7 chatbot allows parents to ask questions at any point of the day.
The founders explained that unlike other general AI assistants, it is trained exclusively on Parent Sense’s own professionally created content. This incorporates Meg’s books and other medical information written by healthcare experts.
“If a parent asks, ‘what activities can I do with my 18-month-old tomorrow?’ it already knows the child’s age and developmental stage, and it gives you activities tailored to that,” Meg said. “It gives you very personalised information tailored to your child. That means you don’t have to rely on the internet.
“Because it is a closed-loop system, it can only give you answers based on our professional expert’s content. If you were to ask it, ‘how to change a car tyre’, it will say it’s not in my information source.”
The pair were quick to mention that their aim was not to replace doctors, but that they see the app as a way of supporting families between appointments.
“We don’t take the place of clinical interventions. We are here to support families between them,” Meg said. “A doctor can’t always be with you at three in the morning, but we can.”
The team review responses regularly and monitor feedback to improve accuracy.
“The question isn’t if a parent is going to use AI. The main question is: is what they are receiving responsible?” the pair said.
Given the sensitive nature of the information put into the app by users, the pair say privacy has been a priority from the outset.
As the platform collects information about children and their development, “data privacy is sacrosanct, and [the company] is GDPR compliant”, undergoing security testing regularly is ensured.
Ambition and growth
The women said they “hope to reach around 3,500 Jersey families, based on the number of under-fives in the Island”.
With hopes to expand functionality and territory and “roll the app out globally” the business has ambitions to reach 1,000,000 babies each year.
“Jersey is the first government-wide roll-out, but we think there will be interest in other countries,” Meg explained.
For Tové, the challenge will be ensuring the app continues to evolve alongside the modern needs of families.
“As technology changes, what we pride ourselves on is that we remain ahead and relevant. Particularly with AI moving to a place where people want to talk out loud, we want to constantly put ourselves in front of parents and say ‘what do you want?’” Tové continued.
“Adoption of the product across families is really important for us. But also embedding the other organisations and stakeholders in the Island onto the product,” Tové said. “We want the app to feel like a Jersey product.”
Success, they stated, will not be measured simply by downloads, but on how widely the platform is adopted by parents and integrated within the community.
“For us, it is for parents in Jersey to feel less alone, less overwhelmed and better connected to the support that already exists around them,” Meg added.
