Medical Disclaimer

This page is the short legal framing. For the longer, plain-language walkthrough of how Susan handles urgent situations, the four safety tiers, and our crisis-resource directory, see Safety.

What Hey Susan is

An AI assistant for parents. She helps you track your baby, remembers what's happened, and offers gentle proactive check-ins. When a pattern looks concerning, she will encourage you to contact your pediatrician or — for urgent signs — call 911.

What Hey Susan is not

She is not a doctor, nurse, lactation consultant, or therapist.
She is not a medical device under any regulatory framework.
She is not a childcare provider.
She does not diagnose.

If something looks wrong

Trust your gut. Call your pediatrician. You can always show Susan's log of feeds, diapers, and sleep to a real clinician so the first five minutes of the call aren't spent reconstructing the last 24 hours.

Emergencies

If your baby is not breathing, is blue around the lips, has been having seizures, is limp or unresponsive, or is under 3 months old with a fever over 100.4°F (38°C), call 911 immediately. Do not consult Hey Susan first — Susan's emergency routing will tell you the same thing, but seconds matter.

Why this disclaimer exists

We built Hey Susan because we almost missed our baby's jaundice. We want other parents to have an AI assistant that notices patterns and nudges them to call a real doctor — not a replacement for one. The difference matters, both for safety and because medical decisions belong with clinicians who can see your child.

For the parent-readable walk-through of what jaundice actually looks like in the first ten days — which signs are normal, which are not, and what to expect from a bilirubin check — see signs of jaundice in newborns. That post is still not medical advice; it is the version of “what we wish someone had told us at the hospital” that would have sent us back in sooner.

The input to that outcome was low intake — feeds weren't keeping up, and the wet-diaper count never climbed the way it should have in those first days. If you want the companion reader-facing walk-through of how hydration is tracked at home (wet-diaper math by age, what to feel for in the mouth and at the fontanelle, and when the pattern is a same-day call), see signs of dehydration in newborns. Same caveat: not medical advice.