Hundreds of kilometres west,\u00a0health workers are using an AI app called Shishu Maapan. It estimates a newborn\u2019s weight and other measurements from a short video taken on a smartphone, replacing bulky equipment traditionally carried from home to home.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, we wondered how weight could be captured on a mobile,\u201d said Jyotsna Patel, an ASHA worker who has worked in Kachigam\u00a0village in Daman district\u00a0for 14 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After training and practice, she said, workers were able to use the app routinely and track whether babies were gaining or losing weight.<\/p>\n
What connects\u00a0these two instances in rural India is not the technology itself,\u00a0but the healthcare workers using it.<\/p>\n
Across the country, doctors, radiologists and community health workers in India’s public health system are already \u201cso loaded with tasks\u201d, said Sagar Sen, senior vice-president at Qure.ai, that adding another layer of work can defeat the purpose of the technology. The\u00a0Mumbai-based firm builds AI tools to analyse medical scans for diseases like TB and lung cancer.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe challenge is to build AI around the way they already work, so that it can take on parts of the workload while leaving clinical judgement with the healthcare worker,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0large parts of the country, where the first point of care for millions of people may be a community health worker or a doctor without a specialist down the corridor, AI is increasingly being built around the people already standing at that front line, experts\u00a0said.<\/p>\n
AI MEETS THE FRONTLINE IN RURAL INDIA<\/p>\n
India has about 1.02 million ASHA\u00a0workers, forming\u00a0the world\u2019s largest community health worker programme. Each is typically expected to serve about 1,000 people,\u00a0with the programme spanning some 586,000 rural villages, according to government data.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s National Health Mission describes ASHA\u00a0workers as the \u201cfirst port of call\u201d for health needs, particularly for women, children and others who struggle to access health services.<\/p>\n
Their responsibilities already span maternal and child health, immunisation and TB screening, while newer duties such as household enumeration, maintaining health registers and data validation have added to their\u00a0workload.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hundreds of kilometres west,\u00a0health workers are using an AI app called Shishu Maapan. It estimates a newborn\u2019s weight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[256,254,64,63,137,500,98089,1209,4083,208264,38783],"class_list":["post-879014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-healthcare-workers","tag-india","tag-lung-disease","tag-public-healthcare","tag-tuberculosis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}