Michael Conward Is Building the Care That Reaches Out Between Visits
The Miami engineer and CEO of MyLÚA Health builds AI that checks in on mothers, then hands what it hears to a real person.
Michael Conward, Ph.D., is an engineer and AI technologist in Miami, Florida, and the CEO and co-founder of MyLÚA Health, a women's health platform that checks in with mothers between their appointments. He also built Henway, an AI app builder for people who aren't technical.
Care that shows up first
Most health apps wait for you to open them. MyLÚA does the opposite. Its companion, LÚA, reaches out by text, email and app notifications, in English or Spanish, and asks how she is doing. When a mother mentions a problem, such as trouble paying for formula, LÚA finds help near her, and her doula sees it too if she chooses to share. A need that stays open climbs to whoever runs her care program until someone closes it.
The platform went live this year in maternal care, pregnancy through postpartum, with Metro Mommy Agency, a South Florida doula agency. Midlife care, perimenopause and menopause, is next.
Conward is plain about what it isn't. LÚA doesn't diagnose or prescribe, and protected health information doesn't reach the AI model. It keeps a woman's doula, nurse or doctor updated instead of replacing them.
Why he built it
He is a technologist first. He has watched the women who raised him get failed by reactive care, and he says the technology to predict risk already existed. Nobody had built the part that acts on it.
The company carries a family name. His co-founder, doula and maternal wellness strategist J'Vanay Santos-Fabian, named it after her niece, Alúa, whose mother was denied pain medication during labor.
Built with IBM
MyLÚA runs on IBM watsonx, and its agents take care of the follow-through: check-ins, reminders, local resources and visit summaries for care teams. In early pilots with a health system partner and the NIH's RADx program, its model flagged postpartum depression risk in the first trimester with more than 90% accuracy, and 79% of users felt comfortable sharing sensitive information. The company is clear that those pilots were not a clinical trial.
This year Conward presented MyLÚA to IBM's Data and AI Customer Advisory Board in New York, his second time in front of that board.
Engineering for high stakes
Conward trained as a mechanical engineer and has spent more than ten years in startups, industry and academia, leading teams as a chief technology officer, director of product and founder. His approach borrows from safety engineering: study how things fail, and keep a human in the loop. Software should support a decision, not make it.
Henway applies the same idea to everyday work. You describe the thing you keep working around in your own words, and about seven minutes later it's a working app at its own link, on any device.
Follow Michael on LinkedIn and see his work at myluahealth.com and henwayai.com.
Highlights
Who is Michael Conward?
Michael Conward, Ph.D., is an engineer and AI technologist in Miami, Florida, and the CEO and co-founder of MyLÚA Health, a women's health platform that checks in with mothers between visits.
What does MyLÚA Health do?
MyLÚA reaches out to women between appointments in English or Spanish, finds help near them and keeps their care team updated. It went live this year in maternal care and runs on IBM watsonx.
What is Henway?
Henway is an AI app builder Conward made for people who aren't technical: you describe a problem in plain words and get a working app at its own link.
