The Doctor Need Not See You Now

Technology can not only reduce the load on doctors, but also make medical treatments and monitoring more affordable and accessible.

- Monica Bathija

You would think there is nothing complicated about weighing a newborn. And yet, in rural India it is quite the opposite. We’re sitting in the office of research institute Wadhwani AI, a not-for-profit AI institute for social good in Andheri, Mumbai, where Rahul Panicker, chief innovation officer, shows photographs of a rural social health worker holding a spring balance that delicately suspends a newborn in a little hammock, as the baby’s family looks on. Another photograph shows a register with data, with most figures putting the weight of babies at 2.5 kg, a figure below which they would be classified as low weight. “Either they [the health workers] don’t have the time or they are overworked, it could be a number of issues,” says Panicker.

Low birth weight accounts for 48 percent of deaths among newborns in India; deaths that can be avoided by timely intervention. And yet, lack of spring balances and cultural hurdles that prevent people from outside the family to touch a baby in its first 30 days, means low birth infants often fall through the net.

The Wadhwani team has come up with a virtual weighing machine, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to produce a virtual 3D reconstruction of a baby. “Most health care workers have been given smartphones by public health programmes. So they can take a short video of the baby, from which we can do a 3D reconstruction of it. From that, we can estimate its weight, height and head circumference, which are difficult to measure on the field,” says Panicker. The technology, which has made it to the last wildcard round of the $5 million IBM Watson AI XPRIZE in the US, will begin field experiments later this year.