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.
Belanger says the name Elina from Greek origins, meaning bright light, was chosen because they hope the app can bring women a little bit of light and guidance in what can often feel like a dark and lonely time.
“We discovered through our own menopause journey, frankly, how little we knew about menopause,” Belanger says.
“That led us to lots of conversations with our friends, women in our professional circles, which led us to realize how common that issue is and how little information women have been given around menopause.”
Menopause is known as the stage of a woman’s life when her periods stop permanently, and she can no longer get pregnant. While it is a normal part of aging for women, it often comes with many different symptoms during and the time leading up to it, known as perimenopause.
Nathalie Belanger, Co-Founder of Ask Elina.
Supplied by Ask Elina
Belanger says she was surprised at how little she knew about perimenopause and the symptoms associated with it, which made it harder to understand what was happening.
She notes that several of her friends were even getting “gaslit” by their doctors, who told them the symptoms were “all in their heads.”
“So imagine feeling that way for seven years, which is the average time that a woman spends in perimenopause. So it became pretty clear to us that women needed more information about what’s happening to their body,” she says.
Both Belanger and her partner are seasoned executives. Belanger, is a former vice-president at both Reitmans retail company and Aeroplan, while Wasserman, the founder of dating platform Mate1.com which has a global online community of over 50 million users.
Elizabeth Wasserman, Co-Founder of Ask Elina.
Supplied bu Ask Elina
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.
Ask Elina, a new app designed to help women effectively navigate perimenopause and menopause.
Supplied by Ask Elina
The app is set to launch in May on both Apple and Android devices.
“Just knowing what’s happening in your body and being able to identify and pinpoint the reason and find ways to help yourself with the symptoms is what we hope to do,” Belanger says.