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Expanding impact of mobile health programs: SAHELI for maternal and child care

Verma, S and Singh, G and Mate, A and Verma, P and Gorantla, S and Madhiwalla, N and Hegde, A and Thakkar, D and Jain, M and Tambe, M and Taneja, A (2023) Expanding impact of mobile health programs: SAHELI for maternal and child care. In: AI Magazine, 44 (4). pp. 363-376.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/aaai.12126

Abstract

Underserved communities face critical health challenges due to lack of access to timely and reliable information. Nongovernmental organizations are leveraging the widespread use of cellphones to combat these healthcare challenges and spread preventative awareness. The health workers at these organizations reach out individually to beneficiaries; however, such programs still suffer from declining engagement. We have deployed Saheli, a system to efficiently utilize the limited availability of health workers for improving maternal and child health in India. Saheli uses the Restless Multi-armed Bandit (RMAB) framework to identify beneficiaries for outreach. It is the first deployed application for RMABs in public health, and is already in continuous use by our partner NGO, ARMMAN. We have already reached �130K beneficiaries with Saheli, and are on track to serve one million beneficiaries by the end of 2023. This scale and impact has been achieved through multiple innovations in the RMAB model and its development, in preparation of real world data, and in deployment practices; and through careful consideration of responsible AI practices. Specifically, in this paper, we describe our approach to learn from past data to improve the performance of Saheli's RMAB model, the real-world challenges faced during deployment and adoption of Saheli, and the end-to-end pipeline. © 2023 The Authors. AI Magazine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Item Type: Journal Article
Publication: AI Magazine
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc
Additional Information: The copyright for this article belongs to author
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Cell phone; Child care; Children healths; Deployed applications; Health projects; Maternal healths; Nongovernmental organizations; Real-world; Restless multi-armed bandit; Workers', mHealth
Department/Centre: Others
Date Deposited: 01 Mar 2024 09:57
Last Modified: 01 Mar 2024 09:57
URI: https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/84021

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