The concept of ‘preventive care’ has been confined mainly to textbooks and is yet to become the daily healthcare norm that we hoped for— a disadvantageous situation for patients and healthcare providers.
However, despite technologies such as AI and ML making significant progress, our society still remains one that is driven by misconceptions.
“If we go deep down, people are so driven by the idea that the need to visit a clinic is required only when some symptoms show up. Nobody cares or talks about a regular, annual/biannual health checkup,” said Dr Nivedita Tiwari, Director of Clinical Operations, Logy.AI.
The lack of affordable healthcare facilities and unavailability of portable solutions turns out to be the major cause of worry for the people. The problem gets multifold when it comes to oral health. This is what Nivedita, a dental care expert, experiences regularly.
More needs to be done, with AI
With a determination to take upon this challenge, Nivedita made her way into a competitive programme at IIIT -Hyderabad – OJAS Post-Doc Entrepreneurship Programme in 2020.
“The program offered me post-doctoral training focused on building a solution (device, app, digital tool) to address problems in disease detection, diagnosis, prevention, treatment, monitoring or wellness. I worked on the implementation of AI for oral screening and detecting early signs of oral cancer as my area of focus,” said Nivedita.
Eventually, she started with Logy.AI. Founded by Priyanjit Ghosh (left) and Anand Panchbhai (right) in 2018, the startup is an AI-based digital patient platform for preventive care from home at “zero” costs for users. Meet the team behind the product named Logy.AI-for-Dentistry.
AI for oral health
Rather than relying on the conventional ways of a patient visiting a doctor to understand the nature and condition of their oral health, the company decided to empower people with AI to screen themselves with the help of a smartphone only, in four easy steps:
- Step 1: Say Hi to Logy.AI-for-Dentistry
- Step 2: Share your name, age and other basic details
- Step 3: Send an image of the inside of your mouth
- Step 4: Get your report in under a minute
Nivedita rightly pointed out; people are so much into social media that they know what clothes to buy, what products to buy, which articles to read. However, the situation gets reversed when it comes to health and most often, they reach out to ‘Doctor Google’ for suggestions.
“Our digital solution helps people to screen themselves with a touch of a hand. I clicked, I know the problem in advance, and then I decide to visit – this is what differentiates us,” she added.
Tech behind
As far as the technology is concerned, the product works at the intersection of computer vision and the conversational AI chatbot. Going into details:
- Computer vision works on the digital images generated by the patient taken via their smartphones. Now, their patented Dental.AI model produces two kinds of real-time reports. One is AI-enabled and the other is an AI-doctor augmented report. It can be delivered via WhatsApp. The report captures the information based on images and shared by the user and with easy-to-understand interpretable information, all delivered on the chatbot.
- For the second part, a conversational AI chatbot takes note of the symptoms and spells out the required kind of care.
As access to oral healthcare was nearly invisible in Nigeria, the startup kickstarted oral health screening and eventually launched the AI bot in collaboration with Colgate. While working on the project, the team noticed that routine dental care checkup is not a well-practised culture, not limited to Nigeria only but to developing countries.
Talking about the importance of patents for a startup, Nivedita agrees with the fact that even if the cost and time for getting patents are a little extensive, if there is a startup that has made some innovation, one must go for it. A patented technology not just prevents it from copying but gives the firm a greater ability to do business around it, hence making it attractive for investors and partners to work with the product.
Future Plans
Emphasising the need to bring the importance of dental care on par with any general healthcare, Nivedita stresses the need to mainstream the concept of preventive care in society. As of now, the company has rolled out its solutions on a small scale, but in the words of Nivedita, the startup is bound to expand to a larger market base.
“We want to be the digital front door, where anybody could come out, get their health screened and get the first-hand information,” concluded Nivedita.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
