How Pola started: the midwife’s questions, notes and a whiteboard
The midwife asked about feeds and diapers. We tried to reconstruct the day from memory, our phones and a whiteboard. Pola came out of that experience.
After the birth, we logged feeds and diapers on our phones. We also had a whiteboard, but we kept forgetting to update it as we went. When the midwife asked about the latest feeds and how many diapers there had been, it was hard to reconstruct the whole day.
That was the starting point for Pola.
What the midwife asked
When did the baby last eat? How often are we feeding? How much did they drink from the bottle? How many diapers were wet, and how many were dirty?
We knew the answers to some of the questions. The rest we had to look up in our notes or piece together between us. The whiteboard helped as long as we remembered to add things. When an entry was missing, we were back to memory.
In Poland, the scope of a midwife’s care for a newborn is described by Pacjent.gov.pl. Care can be organised differently in other countries. Here we describe our own experience, which is where the idea for the app came from.
How we moved our records into the app
We wanted to add an entry quickly and find it later among the other events of that day. That is how the journal of feeds, sleep, diapers and health observations came about.
In Pola, entries go into one shared history. You can check the time of a feed, the amount of milk given from a bottle or the kind of diaper that was changed. These are details that are easy to mix up when several days in a row look alike.
Pola will not fill in the journal for a parent. An entry still has to be added. So it mattered to us that this takes very little time and that earlier records are quick to find.
When another person takes over the care
When care is shared, it helps to have access to the same records. In Pola Plus you can invite a second caregiver to the journal and set their permissions. Each entry shows who added it. After syncing, both people use the same history within the access they have been given.
The Plus version also lets you prepare a PDF report before an appointment. The summary can help you describe what happened over the last few days. We leave assessing the baby’s health and any recommendations to the midwife or doctor.
What we want to make easier
The idea began with our own trouble remembering times and numbers. We still come back to it when designing the app: is it easy to record an event, find it later and pass it on to the other person?
See all of Pola’s features or check where the app is available.
What sits behind a few screens
From the outside, Pola is an icon and a handful of screens. Underneath are two native apps, a backend, this website, five languages and the whole process of shipping to two app stores. How it came together, how much work it was and how AI agents helped along the way is covered in a separate case study: How Pola came to life, on cielebak.com.
