City doc on TIME list for maternal health AI
Mumbai: A Mumbai-based urogynaecologist,
Dr Aparna Hegde
, features on the 2025 TIME100 Health list, which acknowledges influential figures in global healthcare. She shares this recognition with Dr Aparna Taneja from Google Deepmind for their collaborative "artificial intelligence (AI)-based innovations" to reduce maternal and child mortality rates in India.Dr Hegde, attached to
Cama Hospital
, established NGO ARMMAN in 2008, providing free voice calls to women, offering essential information about diet, medication and vaccination during pregnancy.When ARMMAN discovered that 40% of participants discontinued engagement mid-programme, Dr Hegde sought Google's help for an AI-based solution.
"A team led by Google researcher Aparna Taneja trained an AI model on calls from ARMMAN's databases to learn which women are likely to drop out and would benefit most from personal intervention.
The model, tested with a pilot group of around 1,00,000 women, improved retention rate by about 30%," said the TIME article.ARMMAN has reached 63 million pregnant women, mothers and children, and trained over 5 lakh health workers in 28 states. "This milestone acknowledges our efforts to leverage technology for social good and reaffirms the power of cross-sector collaboration in driving sustainable health outcomes," said Dr Hegde. tnn
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