TRANSFORM ALTCAI

 TRANSFORM ALTCAI is externally funded by the Department for International Development (DFID)

Emerging digital technologies offer huge potential for scaling personalized interventions, at low cost, across multiple domains and geographies. Of particular importance for effective scaling is the emergence of a whole series of Interactive artificial intelligent interface (IAI^2) technologies driven by machine learning and expert systems. IAI^2 personalizes the “interaction” with the user as well as the content provided. These are evolving quickly, from simple text interfaces or “bots” via basic speaking “chat bots” to more sophisticated multimodal conversational interfaces that use affective interactions to sense the understanding or state of the user. Increasingly they are deployable on available smartphone platforms. The value here is that, as in real human interactions, personalized interaction and personalized content mutually strengthen each other – a more personalized interaction should enable an expert system to better provide a personalized response and again through the personalized interaction gain a better understanding of whether that response has been understood. The richer and more tailored this digital interaction becomes, the more trust the user will have in the IAI^2 and the greater likelihood of them following up on the advice givenThis is the abstract

There are many challenges to building personalised IAI^2s. A particularly important one for low-income countries, and the one the project will address, is how to design them with cultural sensitivity so they are effective in engaging the user’s low literacy, low connectivity, and low base expertise contexts. This area is poorly researched in the literature, with most work having a developed world focus - yet some of the most valuable applications, certainly in terms of health and wellbeing may well be in low-income contexts, as is relevant to Transform. Following initial expert review, and to focus the research program we will take the as our use case the challenge of improving advice to and education of Medicine Vendors their customers around issues of contraception and perinatal health (of both mother and child).

Start 1/10/2018 – 30/09/2020

 

 

 

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