There is a scarcity of trained healthcare professionals in India. Further, the current approach to healthcare delivery in India is symptom-driven and fails to address the underlying causes of disease which may be a result of the local socioeconomic, cultural, gender, environmental, or infrastructural situation. Community health workers are semi-skilled volunteers who help fill this gap by providing door-to-door care, routinely collecting health data from households, and motivating healthy behaviors. With around a million such health workers across India, there is a huge scope to leverage, support, and extend this human resource. Chitra is a mobile platform that leverages the current pervasive use of mobile phones by community health workers to address the gap between government healthcare delivery and patients' lived realities. It combines qualitative and quantitative data collected by community health workers, and applies machine learning to determine potential, underlying causes of disease and areas at high risk of disease. It delivers these insights through visualizations to health workers and helps them direct their time and energy on tasks and communities that are most critical, thus empowering health workers as well as local communities to deliver and receive better care.
In the TanDEm lab, we focus on matters relating to the design, deployment, adoption, and use of technologies towards empowerment - of underserved and under-represented communities in resource-constrained regions across the world.
