When the Computable Awards 2023 announced their shortlist, few expected a neonatal project to appear among national digital-health frontrunners. Yet the jury singled out the UMCG–Neolook collaboration — “Afwijkingen ontdekken bij te vroeg geboren baby’s” — recognising how early-movement analysis, once confined to specialist hands, is being transformed into an accessible, data-driven standard of care. For Neolook, the nomination reflects something deeper: civic society acknowledging an urgent problem and the joint effort to solve it. It is a reminder that innovation in neonatal care resonates far beyond the hospital.
General Movement Assessment (GMA) is one of the most powerful early predictors of motor and neurological outcomes in preterm infants. It can detect meaningful deviations as early as 10–14 weeks after birth and guide timely intervention. In many countries, GMA is framed as the expected standard of care.
Yet in practice, GMA is constrained by three structural barriers. It demands trained experts whose availability is limited; it requires labour-intensive video review; and clinics lack interoperable tools to capture, store, and analyse videos in a safe and structured way. As a result, many at-risk infants simply do not receive the timely assessment that science already enables. Hospitals across Europe, including the Netherlands, have long been searching for a pathway to scale GMA without compromising clinical quality.
UMC Groningen found itself confronting these same challenges. Each year, 80 to 120 extremely preterm infants are admitted to its NICU. Systematic follow-up is essential to track neurodevelopmental risk, yet manual assessments could not keep pace with the clinical need.
This led UMCG to articulate a bold goal: create a unified, future-proof digital workflow for movement assessments, in the clinic and at home, supported by AI-augmented review. This ambition did not emerge in isolation. It built on the NeoLifeS cohort — a multi-year, national data infrastructure launched in 2016 to understand long-term outcomes in prematurity — and aligned with the European Horizon 2020 project Born-to-Get-There, where digital capture and automated analysis of infant motor behaviour were identified as critical innovations.
UMCG wanted to bring this vision from research into clinical practice. And to do that, they needed a partner capable of building video-AI infrastructure that is medical-grade, clinically embedded, privacy-secure, and scalable across all Dutch perinatal centres.
UMCG and Neolook began to collaborate on a joint redesign of the movement-assessment pathway. The work focused on three pillars: reliable video capture in hospital and at home, safe transfer of GMA recordings into a controlled clinical workspace, and streamlined analysis by accredited assessors supported by AI. What previously required fragmented systems and manual coordination became a unified digital workflow.
The jury of the Computable Awards highlighted precisely this combination of clinical relevance and digital transformation. They noted how, with just five to ten minutes of video, clinicians can identify normal or concerning movement patterns — yet scaling this method requires a systematic, secure, and efficient process. By enabling hospitals to record, receive, and review videos consistently, UMCG’s model turns a recognised bottleneck into a repeatable, data-driven improvement loop.
Today, the NeoLifeS database already includes 340 extremely preterm infants (<30 weeks or <1000g), and its structured expansion now enables earlier detection, better insight into risk factors, and more consistent care pathways across Dutch hospitals.
The Computable Award nomination is not simply a spotlight on a single project. It shows that a broader civic and technological community recognises how essential neonatal innovation has become. A sector not usually associated with national digital-health awards suddenly found its work placed among the most impactful transformations in the country.
For Neolook, it confirms something core to our mission: when hospitals, researchers, and clinical innovators work together, society notices. The collaboration with UMCG demonstrates that even the most specialised neonatal workflows can be modernised, standardised, and made scalable — without losing the craftsmanship of clinical expertise.
This is “uniting those who care” in action, where clinical insight, digital infrastructure, and societal recognition align around the future of early childhood development. The nomination is not the end of the journey but the proof that the path forward is both needed and possible.