King's College London

The Enhanced Maternal and Baby Results with AI-supported Care and Empowerment (EMBRACE) programme of studies will support women and their partners from pregnancy through to the child’s second birthday - a critical period for development and lifelong health.

Researchers will explore novel approaches to improve the health of families by understanding the barriers and facilitators to being more active. It will be the world’s largest digital cohort of pregnant women, their partners and their babies with 60,000 people from diverse regions around the world taking part.

The project is made possible by a generous donation from Inkfish, a philanthropic research organisation. Inkfish’s support reflects a deep commitment to advancing science and improving lives through bold, future-facing innovation.

He added: "It will pioneer new approaches to prevention and revolutionise maternal and early childhood health through precision-personalised interventions, powered by a groundbreaking fusion of cutting-edge AI and compassionate human support.”

Pregnancy is one of the most demanding physical and physiological processes a human body can endure. There are more than 200 million pregnancies worldwide every year, and up to a third of women experience lasting health impacts.

EMBRACE will seek to address the significant challenges posed by conditions like gestational diabetes, pregnancy hypertension, and perinatal depression – conditions rising worldwide. Current research indicates that physical activity can reduce these risks by up to 40%, yet prevention research, including on exercise-as-medicine, remains substantially underfunded and lags far behind disease treatment research.

EMBRACE will consist of two multidisciplinary components led by King’s with partners around the world:

1. The world’s largest digital record of the genetic makeup of a birth cohort including 60,000 pregnant women, their partners and babies, from the UK, Spain, Peru, Ghana, China and Canada. Data, including physical activity levels, stress and sleep, will be collected from different sources including from wearable devices. An AI assistant will be developed to use this data to reveal the complex factors influencing health in pregnant women, their children and partners.
2. Fuelled by the study data, researchers will then launch a clinical trial in the UK to test a new blended ‘human-AI health assistant’. This programme of support will be delivered through a combination of digital platforms and human interaction during pregnancy and the child’s first few years. This assistant will adapt to each individual and aim to support them through the pregnancy and the first two years of life of the child as well as forecast health issues before they begin, empowering families to protect their health long term. This intervention will be a world-first, powered by advanced multimodal AI prediction models capable of truly personalising pregnancy and early childhood care.

As well as providing personalised interventions for mothers and babies, the findings of EMBRACE aim to reduce healthcare costs associated with health conditions linked to pregnancy and establish an unprecedented resource of physiological, psychological, and digital data. This will accelerate the development and validation of AI-driven prediction models and interventions. The researchers could also use this data to track the children through their adolescence and into adulthood.

As part of the historic donation, Inkfish will also support the next generation of researchers by establishing Inkfish Fellowships and Inkfish PhD Studentships to work on the project.

Dr Argyro Syngelaki, a Reader in Maternal-Fetal Medicine at King’s and part of the EMBRACE research team, said: “This remarkable donation provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to conduct a truly diverse international study, offering insights from multicultural and multi-ethnic populations worldwide. EMBRACE will enable King’s to develop genuinely personalised interventions, directly addressing major pregnancy complications and improving outcomes for women and their children across different settings and communities.’’

Professor Ajay Shah, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s said: “As a Faculty, our mission is to significantly improve human health locally and globally by driving advances in scientific, medical and clinical research and education. Thanks to this incredible donation, through the EMBRACE study we will make significant progress towards that goal. Some of the funding will support post-doctoral fellowships and PhDs allowing us to develop the next generation of world-leading digital population health research expertise.” 

Gabe Newell, co-founder of Inkfish, said: “We are proud to partner with King’s College London and Professor Car on the EMBRACE programme. King’s is a world-leading institution in women’s and children's health, population health and AI and digital health research. By uniting these strengths through EMBRACE, we will find data-informed, innovative solutions to critical health issues affecting pregnant women, their babies, and their families. The aim – to save and transform lives for good.”

Professor Graham Lord, Senior Vice-President, Health & Life Sciences, at King’s College London, said: "Research participant diversity is not just a matter of equity; it is a scientific imperative. By including people from different walks of life around the world in this study, we can better understand health inequalities, improve the quality of findings and make sure data truly represents the populations we aim to serve. This approach is essential for advancing healthcare for the benefit of everyone."

Inkfish’s support builds on an existing philanthropic partnership between King’s and The Heart of Racing – a partner organisation to Inkfish – which funded Brain Health in Gen2020. This six-year research programme looks at the effects on children of maternal prenatal exposure to COVID-19.