BENGALURU: For years, Panthula Uha, a community healthcare worker in Chagallu village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, knew what to ask to identify people who might have tuberculosis (TB). But this method of screening could miss villagers who showed no symptoms, she said.That changed in March, when Uha and her team of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) - government-employed frontline health workers whose acronym also means ‘hope’ in Hindi - began going house to house, asking people to do something unusual: cough into a smartphone for a few seconds. Their phones were equipped with an artificial intelligence-enabled app called Swaasa to detect patterns linked with respiratory diseases. Uha said the tool identified asymptomatic people for further testing, with some subsequently diagnosed with TB and put on treatment.For T Gowramma, a 73-year-old patient at Chagallu village, this experience was less daunting.“Whenever I had a cough, I used to worry that it was something serious,” she said. “The hospital staff came to our home and tested me using just my cough on the Swaasa app. It was very easy.”
A patient coughs into a smartphone during a tuberculosis screening pilot using the AI-enabled Swaasa app, conducted by a team of ASHA community health workers in Chagallu village, Andhra Pradesh, India. (Photo: Salcit Technologies)
