Primary Health Care

Martin Mwangi of Intellisoft Consulting Ltd. in Kenya will build an application-supported LLM to improve knowledge, attitudes, and practices surrounding the risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCD) for young people in Kenya. NCDs constitute the leading cause of mortality globally, accounting for three-quarters of deaths worldwide. Many Kenyans lack information on NCDs and their major risk factors, which include unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and harmful alcohol use.

Cally Ardington of the University of Cape Town in South Africa will develop an AI-powered voice-recognition model that performs Early Grade Reading Assessments (EGRA) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Seventy percent of children in LMICs do not learn to read in any language, which severely affects their overall education and future prospects. Reading assessments, such as EGRA, test children on letter-sound knowledge, word reading, reading connected text, and answering questions on that text.

Brenda Hendry of Boresha Live in Tanzania will integrate ChatGPT-4 into community radio to broadcast inclusive health messages across Tanzania to combat malaria. Tanzania is among the top ten countries with the highest malaria cases and deaths. Their control efforts are severely hampered by limited access to accurate health information among certain populations. Radio is very popular and reaches across rural and remote areas making it a powerful communication medium.

Nana Kofi Quakyi of the Aurum Institute in Ghana will develop an AI-powered decision support tool for antibiotic prescribers to improve appropriate antimicrobial usage and combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Ghana. AMR is a major public health concern, with the highest mortality rates occurring in Africa. To address this, Ghana's National Action Plan for Antimicrobial Use and Resistance (2018) identified the need for support tools that provide personalized, adaptable, and context-sensitive recommendations.

Khoa Doan of VinUniversity in Vietnam together with Helen Meng, Viet Anh Nguyen, and colleagues from the Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, both in Hong Kong; in collaboration with the Hanoi Obstetrics & Gynecology Hospital in Vietnam, will build a conversational AI chatbot to scale up gynecological healthcare support for women and LGBT+ communities in Vietnam.

Maryam Mustafa of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan will build a voice-enabled, mobile phone-based, conversational AI assistant, Awaaz-e-Sehat, for maternal healthcare workers in Pakistan to create and manage detailed electronic medical records. Pakistan has among the poorest pregnancy outcomes worldwide.

Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende of Makerere University in Uganda will leverage ChatGPT to provide tailored support to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa in their local languages. These smallholder farmers contribute up to 69% of household incomes, but they are vulnerable to the devastating effects of crop diseases and pests and lack the timely support required to combat such challenges. Digital technologies have been developed to help but they cover a limited number of crop types and languages.

Nirmal Ravi of EHA Clinics Ltd. in Nigeria will develop and test scalable and cost-effective ways to use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT-4 to provide “second opinions” for community health workers (CHEWs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). These second opinions would mirror what a reviewing physician might advise the provider in question after seeing or hearing their initial report.

Joseph Mulabbi of Comzine Tech And Investments Limited - Dromedic Health Care in Uganda will use ChatGPT-4 to optimize the surveillance of zoonotic diseases and predict future pandemics. Zoonoses are infectious human diseases that originate from animals and represent over 75% of all emerging diseases. Predicting the emergence of a zoonotic disease currently requires manual monitoring of the dynamic interactions between humans and livestock, which is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to delays.

Leonora Tima of Kwanele - Bringing Women Justice in South Africa will develop a mobile application and chatbot to provide understandable legal information on gender-based violence (GBV) to vulnerable groups, including high school learners, young women, survivors of GBV, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and sex workers. South Africa faces disproportionately high rates of GBV but lacks access to justice and understandable legal information for survivors.