Lilu MilkSense Milk Tracking App

From the insights gathered from Lilu’s first product (the Lilu Massage Bra), my team and I uncovered a truly pressing need — breastfeeding and pumping stress directly impact a mother’s mental wellbeing. Improving breastfeeding and pumping is critical to decrease the risk of postpartum mood disorders which affect over 40% of new moms. That’s why we set out to tackle the uncertainty of milk supply to help moms with their feelings of overwhelm, isolation, and anxiety. 

With a $1.25M grant from the National Science Foundation we set out to create the MilkSense Bra + App.

The MilkSense Bra + App is the first technology to provide real-time tracking of breastmilk supply while also caring for the overall physical and mental health of moms  – since they can’t take care of their baby if they don’t first take care of their own selves.

As moms feed their baby or pump, the cutting edge sensors embedded in our bra collect information about their breast milk production, expression, breathing, stress levels, movement, and sleep to provide them with holistic insights about their lactation via the accompanying mobile app.

The MilkSense Bra will be ready in 2025. However, a lot of the functionality from the app could start to provide benefit to moms and insights to Lilu about user behavior, so we decided to launch a standalone version of the MilkSense App. The beta release is scheduled for Q1 2024 for iOS and Android shortly after.

Problem

The ideation for the mobile app had begun many years earlier, even prior to the conceptualization of the MilkSense product line. The logistics of planning, scheduling and understanding milk production for moms is very stressful. We often quote an example of a mother who was pumping 6 times a day, for 60 minutes each time.

Problem 1: some moms, in an effort to make enough milk, end up overpumping. By tweaking her schedule, it’s likely this mom could pump 1-2 times more often during the day, but only half the time each session, and still produce a similar amount (or even more). The body needs time to produce milk and it’s faster to empty than to produce, therefore she probably was spending the second half of her pumping sessions barely expressing any milk because her body simply hadn’t produced more milk yet.

Problem 2: moms want to track their output, and are either doing it by hand or inputting manually into an app. While good for motivation, that doesn’t necessarily give them helpful insights or guidance on how to best manage their schedule, or how to anticipate growth spurts for the baby, or how to best come back from a bout of illness that may have affected their milk supply.

Wireframes

After hundreds of interviews with moms, and an in-depth analysis for the competitive landscape for lactation tracking apps, as well as other habit forming apps such as journaling, financial planning, and fitness apps, we set the creative direction of the app, as well as outlining the key functionality.

It was paramount that the app would be easy to navigate, be motivational, helpful and inspiring.

User Flow Creation

In terms of the functionality, we focused first on the key flows: tracking a session and reviewing trends.

Lo-Fi Mocks

Hi-Fi Mocks