2021 Seed Grant Award Problem Statements 

Health and Wellbeing

Problem #4: Prevention and early detection of cancer in women.

Country/Region of execution:  India
Collaborating Organization: Aaroogya Foundation
Aaroogya is in alignment with the vision and mission of the holistic umbrella of the Indian National Health Protection scheme called ‘Ayushman Bharat’. It involves improvising and establishing existing Public Health, Primary Care and Wellness Centers. The scheme shall cover families from the lower economic strata who have little or no access to basic healthcare facilities. Aaroogya is not a conventional Non-Governmental Organization, but a Holistic concept of Disrupting and Democratizing Preventive Healthcare with contemporary social innovations, incorporating into the Public Health Care Domain in India. We have been focused in the domain of women cancer and have been working on Breast, Cervical and Oral cancers. The organization consist of a core team which has 6 core members and 12 fellows.
Problem Statement Description:  The silent pandemic of cancer may affect 130 million Indians by 2030. Women will be the worst sufferers of this 'upcoming' pandemic. The top three of the five most common cancers will affect women. These are breast cancer, cervical cancer, and oral cancer. The women affected by these cancers will belong to deprived strata of the society. Many of these women will be found in inaccessible areas of the country. Good health care infrastructure is inaccessible and expensive for them. In addition to the above women belonging to the rural sector of society not aware of the perils of the disease. We at Aaroogya Foundation are looking to change this. We are bringing quality preventive cancer Healthcare to the door steps of rural India. We Have developed an artificial intelligence assisted mobile application for Android platform. The application is interactive in nature and procures information about the lifestyle, vulnerability, habits and symptoms of the patients. The data is analyzed through an algorithm, and patients are classified into high risk, medium risk and low risk. Moving forward we are looking to develop an engine which can improve our artificial intelligence enabled software and also fuse other non-invasive measures such as images, questionnaires and sensor based information gathering systems. We want to integrate these non-invasive methods into a robust early cancer detection and prevention technique. We aim to empower frontline Healthcare workers with this tool for community-based cancer screening so that we can reach the inaccessible areas of India. The need is to evaluate estimation methods and analyze inputs through statistical approach and AI technique for development of estimation method of risk of Breast cancer in our ongoing projects of Pune, Maharashtra in 1000 underprivileged women. The bottleneck is to do a feasibility study to analyze inputs through statistical approach and AI technique to assess the risk of breast cancer.