Sehreen Noor Ali was in the process of building an incredible career in EdTech (education technology), from stints at major companies like Kaplan Test Prep and startups like Noodle, a company on mission to make advanced learning more accessible. Noor Ali began her career in the U.S. Department of State, leading a team of folks developing digital public diplomacy tools.
Sleuth co-founder Sehreen Noor Ali
But in 2017, she had no choice but to exit the workforce once her daughter was diagnosed as medically complex. What Noor Ali realized during that time was how many parents are forced to leave their jobs or decrease their work hours so they can spend time navigating their children’s physical and mental health issues.
Meanwhile, as Noor Ali went from specialist to specialist on her journey of trying to figure out what was wrong with her daughter, she kept finding that the most helpful information came not always from medical professionals, but from other parents.
Noor Ali and her husband relied on the guidance of parents around them to make difficult decisions as they saw their child through a serious neurosurgery, prolonged hospitalization, and a multi-year rehabilitation.
“It was other parents who taught us how to replace a g-tube, showed us the signs of medical trauma, the qualities of a well-trained swallow therapist, and tactics for fighting insurance to cover her formula,” she says.
This inspired Noor Ali to create an app that would harness the power of the parent community, offering adequate data for parents to easily look up symptoms and behaviors within developmental stages of children from infants to age 17.
Sleuth finally launched in September 2023, combining her EdTech experience with the insight that the best advice for children experiencing medical issues often comes from other parents.
Together with her co-founder, AI expert Alex Leeds, the duo gleaned data from over 62,000 parents to build a robust database for parents navigating their children’s health and development issues.
“It’s kind of like a Waze for kids’ health,” Noor Ali says. “If your kid has ADHD, autism, or general developmental questions, we can help you know if there’s an issue and identify what that issue is.”
“For kids, there's always a narrative of, ‘this is normal, you'll be fine,’” she continues. “Luckily, that's true for most kids. But still, why don't we have a tool that helps parents know where they are on the ‘normal’ spectrum so we can stop worrying? Let’s exchange the worry with data.”
Sleuth’s database is built using integrated elements of OpenAI, maps, health symptoms and behaviors. The database was built using the actual words that parents use when they describe their children's health, which are classified using the text embeddings of OpenAI. Then, the accuracy is supported by sophisticated statistics.
Sleuth's user interface
“Some of the best advice I got was from other parents. That’s the heart of how we started Sleuth,” Noor Ali says.
But it’s not just anecdotal. “The science around crowdsourced data is really strong,” she says, which is something Leeds pointed out when they first began working together.
Noor Ali and Leeds set out to create a proprietary way of sourcing their own data so they didn’t have to rely on a third party.
“We crowdsourced directly from parents who opted in. We told them that their information was going into a crowdsourced database on children's health,” Noor Ali says. “So all the consent was there. And so now what we have is symptomology and condition information across hundreds of different topics from potty training to sleep issues to social anxiety.”
What about privacy for users who want to use the tool to get information for their own children, but don’t want to share their information?
Sleuth actually doesn’t rely on current users to input data into their database. Noor Ali says they have enough information with the 62,000 health histories they already collected before launch. Each topic needs about 500-1500 health histories for accurate coverage, and they have more than enough to assure parents of their data’s accuracy.
“We don’t ask for a child’s full name or other identifying information,” she explains. “Whatever information you’re sharing, no one will know it’s you. The only person who can see the information of your child is you. All everyone else sees is the aggregate data and percentages. If you decide you don’t want your child’s information in the database, it won’t go in the database.”
Noor Ali wants parents to imagine a future where the parents of kids with a developmental delay can identify and understand it sooner so that can lead to intervention, therapy or treatment as early as possible. She wants a child’s journey with ADHD to come with a map, not a roundabout. Most of all, she wants parents to have a 360-degree view of their child’s health and development so they fully understand what’s on track and what needs more attention.
“A Sleuth is not just someone who looks for clues,” she says. “A sleuth is also a family of bears. The Mama Bear in me came out with my daughter’s journey and once unleashed it never went back in.”
Now, Noor Ali hopes Sleuth can become an advocacy tool to help both parents and pediatricians identify developmental delays, help parents navigate their kids' health issues, and democratize access to information about children’s health and development.
