One of the hardest moments for a mom with a premature infant is leaving the hospital without her baby. They want to be with their child and take care of them, but they can't. Some parents have other children at home, live far from the hospital, or have to return to work. These mothers lose the chance to bond with their new baby, and a premature baby loses the nurturing sounds of their mother. Samsung Voices of Life helps reconnect them.

I worked as a digital producer with London-based Unit9 and the team at Leo Burnett to build an app to better connect mothers of premature babies with their child while they cannot be together. Research shows that a mother's voice not only has a calming effect on a baby, but that exposure to recorded maternal sounds inside the incubator can help premature babies gain more weight and provide them with the stimulation they need to develop healthy hearing, language and attention skills. Using two Samsung S7's, moms are able to capture their heartbeats using the phone's fingerprint scanner, record their voice and heartbeat, "wombify" the audio to remove the high frequencies not present in the womb, and send recordings to the NICU nurse to be played for the baby inside the incubator. 

Without paid media, Voices of Life received 4 million impressions in a single week. A pilot program is poised to roll out in 3 to 5 markets around the world, installing technology in hospitals, training staff and recruiting families.