M.A.P.L.E.
Matlinked
Matlinked is a digital platform designed to reduce maternal mortality among Indigenous women in rural Canada, where only 48% have access to regular healthcare providers. Our app combines artificial intelligence, digital governance and culturally rooted practices into an informational hub for indigenous mothers. Users gain access to 5 core features: a resource center, a chat box with midwives, a Map, a forum and a calendar. By bridging gaps in care and honoring Indigenous knowledge, Matlinked empowers women with accessible, relevant, and culturally safe maternal health support.
Technical Elements
Entrepreneurship
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Learning Journey
Learning Journey
Understanding indigenous mothers' needs was our greatest challenge as non-indigenous, metropolitan high school students. We prioritized speaking with indigenous leaders, researching historic medical treatment, and consulting midwives to better understand our audience. In the future, we'd dedicate even more time to communicating directly with indigenous mothers. Accessibility without WIFI was another hurdle , since our chatbot requires connectivity, we engineered all other tabs to function offline. Ultimately, this experience showed us that students truly have the power to create meaningful impact. You just have to put yourself out there and stay open to learning.
Information Legitimacy Description
Through our project's trajectory we spent approximately 2 months exclusively doing research on our project. In the period we used the Mcgill library's sources, UQAM's sources and google scholar to filter all unreputable sources. Once we had all of our sources and research articles completed we used NotebookLM to verify that all the information we wrote was cited and that we didn't need additional sources to support our claims. Finally once everything had been completed we sent our research article to mentors and academics in our community and implemented their comments.
Bibliography
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While workshopping our solution, data privacy and accessibility were imperative obstacles that needed to be addressed. To ensure that the data of our application was safe and maintained the same standards of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession, our team instituted a mix of cloud and local data storage so that users could choose how their data was stored. By having the choice between these two systems, users are able to access accurate healthcare information tailored to them while ensuring complete agency over how that information is being used. In terms of accessibility, after having spoken with the prior Grand Chief of Kanawake, we discovered that the inclusion of text to voice, translation into indigenous languages as well as French and English and using indigenous folklore to ease mothers into their transition into motherhood was essential.
