AI for health

There are an estimated 3.8 million community health workers in 98 countries, providing community-based care and referrals. AI can support these unsung heroes with training and education, automated diagnosis, triage and case management.

• Docokids (Colombia) is developing a generative AI model to assist paediatricians in triaging reports of fever cases in rural areas, helping parents assess symptoms and decide whether they can manage a case at home or must travel to seek emergency care.
• Diagnostic tools include Eyebou (United Arab Emirates) for strabismus, Avyantra (India) for neonatal sepsis and Neural Labs Africa (Kenya) for pulmonary diseases.
• CareNX (India) has developed Fetosense, an app using AI and off-the-shelf smartphones to make fetal monitoring accessible to mothers everywhere.
• Air for Tomorrow (Lao People’s Democratic Republic) installs air quality sensors in schools to gather pollution data that will feed an AI predictive model and inform public health decisions.
• Moner Bondhu (Bangladesh) uses AI-powered assessments to offer accessible and affordable well-being services for children and young adults.
• Portal Telemedicina (Brazil) uses AI to compile vaccination data and generate maps highlighting gaps to help deliver basic vaccines to zero-dose children.
• Elsa Health (Tanzania) uses AI to provide clinical decision support, symptom assessment and disease outbreak prediction and tracking. The company has built a model to help predict the cause of a patient’s illness from among 50 conditions to address the high rate of misdiagnosis.
• Data solutions include UNICEF’s Reach the Unreached initiative to identify zero-dose children who have missed out on vaccines, and Population Data for Action which integrates settlement, census and satellite data to support health planning.