Shortest Lives turns medical data into an emotional memory.

We used data stored for medical reasons to create a new way of grieving for parents of stillborn babies. Based on an ultrasound, we reconstructed the sound of the heartbeat and created a personalised audiovisual memory, also including the days of pregnancy and gender. This new way of coping with the loss of a stillbirth answers a great demand of parents who feel their grief is difficult to cope with, as they have nothing of their children to hold onto and remember them by. Thanks to Shortest Lives they finally do.

In Belgium 4,3%* of births are stillbirths. Losing your child is the worst thing a parent can imagine. But for parents of stillborn babies the grief is complicated as they have very little of their children to remember them by. They also feel they can’t always talk about it with their surroundings, as other people may find it hard to imagine the connection parents already had with their unborn child.

According to the grief counselors of Child and Family, a governmental agency for child wellbeing, parents can be helped in their grieving process by recognizing the existence of their baby. How? By holding onto details like weight, length, ultrasound pictures or anything that else they can remember their baby by. But unfortunately, during pregnancy there isn’t much to hold onto.

*https://statbel.fgov.be/nl/themas/bevolking/sterfte-en-levensverwachting/foeto-infantiele-sterfte#:~:text=In%202020%20werden%20494%20kinderen,doodgeboorten%20daalde%20in%20alle%20gewesten. Official numbers for 2020 (last known year)

In order to give parents of stillborn babies something to hold onto in their grief and remember their babies, we wanted to give them back the most emotional memory they have of their babies: hearing their heartbeats for the first time.

Shortest Lives is a serene audio-visual reproduction of a stillborn baby’s heartbeat. It gives proof that your stillborn baby actually existed and offers a new and personalized way of grieving. It was initiated by the University hospital of Ghent.

On the Shortest Lives’ website, you can request to receive your audiovisual experience of your baby’s heartbeat. Besides the heart rhythm, we also used other specific and personal data points like the baby’s gender, its size and the days of pregnancy to transform it into an audiovisual image of your baby’s heartbeat. Every part of the design was chosen to recognize and honor a stillborn baby’s life.

Shortest Lives is a platform where parents can ask for an audiovisual interpretation of their stillborn baby’s heartbeat. Using the ultrasound picture and other data points such as the baby's gender, its size and the days of the pregnancy, it transforms medical data into beautiful visualisation, a memory you can hold onto and share whenever you need to.

Because of the way we brought the data alive emotionally, parents are given proof that their baby really was there, even if they were the only ones who got to connect with it when it was still alive. It provides personalised and lasting comfort which helped the parents in turn in their grieving process.

Since this is a solution that is based on data, it can be made accessible to all hospitals who want to help recognise the grief of parents with stillborn babies.

We transformed the data of ultrasound into the possibility to relive the memory of the first moment of connection with your baby. For this transformation we start from the visual peaks that represent the heartbeat and created a custom software to be able to transform this into an audiovisual image. We added other data points: how far along the pregnancy was, how many days it’s been since the passing, in which month the baby was born and the gender of the baby. A lot of work went into finding a scripted way to transform the data of the heartbeat into beautiful audio that makes us think of hearts. These were saved as different layers of an audiovisual that were brought together in a video that can be sent to the parents and are played on a loop.

We were able to turn data into a story that triggered strong emotions and empathy:

-Shortest Lives had 4,99M earned impressions within the first week of the initiative.

-Immediately after the launch there have been 223 requests by parents of stillborn babies to receive a personalized heartbeat of their baby.

-Of all the parents who already received the heartbeat of their stillborn baby, 3 out of 4 shared it with friends and familie, thus creating more awareness for the subject and helping to break the taboo.

-86% of the parents who already received the heartbeat of their stillborn baby, said it helped them in their mourning process.

-Today, 1 in 3 of the parents whose baby was stillborn in 2022, already filed a request to receive their baby’s heartbeat.

-Other hospitals in Belgium and abroad have reached out to offer this service to their patients as well.

Belgians are reserved. They don’t grieve in public. Grief counselors that have accompanied parents of stillborn babies during the days of the stillbirth witness an additional difficulty to grieve because the existence of their babies isn’t acknowledged. They are not considered to be on the same level as parents that have lost a child that was already born. They don’t have many memories and their friends and family never got to meet the baby.

A lot of stillborn babies also didn’t exist legally. In neighboring country The Netherlands, the law does allow to register stillborn babies at an earlier stage of the pregnancy than Belgium. This means it’s harder for Belgian parents to grieve. They can’t even take official grieving time off.