Latest news with #ARMMAN
Time of India
09-05-2025
- Health
- Time of India
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 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 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 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
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
Aparna Hegde and Aparna Taneja
Dr. Aparna Hegde founded India-based non-profit ARMMAN in 2008 after working in an overcrowded Mumbai maternity clinic where she saw new mothers and their babies die of avoidable complications. Her solution is a 'tech plus touch model' which provides targeted preventive care information to enrolled women through free voice calls. But as they scaled to millions of participants, 40% of women stopped engaging midway. ' Studies have shown that if women get information at the right time, there is improvement in health outcomes for themselves and their children,' says Hegde. ARMMAN trained health workers to reach out to women that dropped out of the program, but needed help identifying which high risk women to prioritize, so they approached Google for an AI 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 100,000 women, improved retention rate by about 30%, and increased how likely expectant mothers were to be proactive about following health guidelines—which is correlated with better health outcomes. 'It's the most rewarding experience to do such cutting edge AI research with meaningful social impact,' Taneja says. Plus, she says, 'the model is applicable to similar problems, both in the context of health and other domains, because the ideology is to solve resource allocation under budget constraints.'
