Google Research India’s success story on AI-enabled maternal health

Researchers from Google Research and IIT Madras worked with ARMMAN to design an AI technology that could indicate women who were at risk of dropping out from the health information programme

Google Research India, an AI Lab in Bengaluru, recently updated its project on maternal health, which it had undertaken and highlighted successes and challenges in AI for social good. 

Researchers from Google Research and IIT Madras worked with ARMMAN to design an AI technology that could indicate women who were at risk of dropping out from the health information programme. 

ARMMAN runs mMitra, a free mobile voice call service that sends timely and targeted preventive care information to expectant and new mothers. Adherence to such public health programmes is a big challenge but timely intervention to retain people is beneficial to improve maternal health outcomes. 

The early targeted identification helps ARMMAN to personalise interventions and retain these people, improving maternal health outcomes. Test results demonstrated that the use of AI technology was able to bring down the risk of drop-offs by up to 32 per cent for women at high risk of dropping out. The team is currently working towards scaling this to 300,000+ women in mMitra and Google is excited to continue to support ARMMAN as the project team increases the reach of this technology to 1M+ mothers and children in 2021. 

To support ARMMAN’s growing efforts, Google.org is committing another $530,000 to ARMMAN to scale the use of AI for social good to reach underserved women and children. 

The importance of targeted interventions to improve health outcomes cannot be overstated. AI can help play a critical role in its advancement, however, the lack of availability of high-quality public health data is a significant challenge. Frequently, data collection is enabled through the labour and expertise of frontline health workers and yet Khushibaby discovered various challenges in the field that inhibited the collection of the high-quality data required. 

Researchers from Singapore Management University and Google Research collaborated with Khushibaby to develop AI algorithms with over 90 per cent accuracy that provided timely predictions about the drop in health workers’ data quality. These timely predictions help Khushibaby assist the health worker to enable them to record high-quality data. The project team is currently planning to deploy and safely test this technology with 250+ healthcare workers who serve over 15,000 people.