Why this app will never tell you your baby is fine

Every baby-tracking app eventually gets the same request, phrased a hundred ways: tell me whether this is normal. Is this enough feeds. Is this too few nappies. Is this weight all right. Is my daughter fine.

Hodierna will never answer that. Not “not yet”, not “not until we have a doctor on the team”. Never. It is worth explaining why, because from the outside a refusal looks like a missing feature, and it is closer to being the whole product.

The app does not know anything

An app that tracks feeds knows what somebody typed into it. That is the entire extent of its knowledge.

It does not know that you were away for the afternoon and your partner forgot to log two feeds. It does not know your daughter was born at 36 weeks. It does not know she has been unusually sleepy since yesterday, because there is no field for “unusually”, and if there were you would not have filled it in at 4am. It does not know what her skin looks like right now. It cannot hear her breathing.

A doctor with all of that in front of them, and years of training, will still sometimes want to see the baby again tomorrow before saying anything. The idea that a phone with six numbers in it can do better is not ambition. It is a category error.

“Everything looks normal” is a claim, and it can be wrong

Here is the failure mode that decides this for us.

An app shows a green tick and the words everything looks normal. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is right, in the trivial sense that nothing was wrong anyway. The hundredth time, a parent who had a bad feeling looks at the green tick, feels slightly foolish for worrying, and waits until morning.

That is the entire risk, and no amount of small grey disclaimer text underneath removes it. The app did not add information. It added permission to stop paying attention — and it took that permission away from the one person in the room who actually has the whole picture, and who was right to be uneasy.

The same is true in the other direction. A red badge saying a gap between feeds is too long, generated from a threshold that knows nothing about your child, produces panic on a night that did not need any. Neither of those is a service.

Where the line actually falls

The rule we work to is narrow enough to check: the app may state, and may not interpret.

Stating is: “3.28 kg, 185 g more than last time.” “Last feed 2 hours 40 minutes ago.” “Six nappies today.” “Weight plotted against the WHO reference bands.” All of those are things you put in, arranged so you can read them.

Interpreting is anything that adds a judgement to those numbers: fine, low, normal, on track, behind, enough, too long. It is also, and this is the part that catches teams out, anything triggered by a threshold. A line that only appears when a value crosses a number is an opinion about that number, however neutrally it is worded. Colour is interpretation too — a figure that turns amber is being told it is bad.

So the growth charts plot the reference bands and say nothing. The home screen tells you when the last feed was and does not tell you whether that is a long time. Night Watch rings at an interval you chose; it is an alarm clock you set, not a judgement the app made about your baby.

We made it a test, not a promise

Values that live only in a style guide get eroded — usually not by a decision, but by a well-meaning string added at 1am to make a screen feel warmer.

So the rule is machine-checked. There is a test in the shared core that reads every user-facing string in all three languages and fails the build when it finds the vocabulary of reassurance or alarm: normal, fine, healthy, good, too much, too little, and the equivalents in Dutch and Turkish. It has caught real copy, written by us, that we did not notice was a diagnosis in a friendly voice.

A test is a promise you cannot quietly break. That is the only kind worth making about something like this.

What we do instead

We point at people. Unconditionally, without a threshold deciding when to mention them. Which people depends on where you are: in the Netherlands the app names your kraamzorg, verloskundige, consultatiebureau and huisarts, because those are what they are called when you actually pick up the phone. In the United States it names your pediatrician and your OB-GYN, for the same reason. The names follow the country rather than the language — a Turkish-speaking family in Rotterdam still needs the word verloskundige.

And we make the writing-down as fast as we can, because the genuinely useful thing an app can do here is not analysis. It is that when a professional asks how the last two days have gone, you can answer accurately instead of guessing — and that when you have a bad feeling at 3am, you have the facts in your hand and can call someone who is allowed to have an opinion.

You will know something is wrong before we do. Our job is to have the record ready when you make that call.

Hodierna is a baby logbook that works offline and is free forever, in Dutch, English and Turkish.

Also in: Nederlands Türkçe