In many low- and middle-income countries, families living in remote areas often have insufficient access to healthcare and health-related services to adequately support their children’s development in the first years of their life. Digital tools, though, may help to fill this gap. This research will assess the efficacy, and improve the performance of, a mobile phone-based interactive application based on AI, artificial intelligence. The aim is to further develop this digital tool to help parents best support the development of their children in the first 1000 days of life.
Hundreds of millions of children living in low- and middle-income countries are exposed to early life adversities such as poverty, malnutrition and infectious diseases which delay their development. Additionally, growing evidence indicates that the level of nurturing care that a child receives early in life plays an important role in influencing their development. Therefore, interventions that aim to improve the environment in which infants and young children are growing up are now being implemented to help improve their future life and health trajectories.
Currently, the most promising interventions for improving child development in low-income settings are home-visiting programmes in which healthcare staff or social workers help parents to support the healthy development of their children. Though such programmes are challenging to scale up in many countries due to various economic, social and logistical factors. However, the growing universal availability of mobile phones is opening new avenues for overcoming these challenges, enabling healthcare services to reach even the most vulnerable populations through such digital devices.
This research consortium brings together expertise in early childhood development, epidemiology, health economics and AI to enhance a currently available mobile application, Afinidata. The AI platform provides parents with a personal digital assistant for detailed guidance on child health development. In this study, the team will assess the reach, impact and scalability of the platform through a study involving 2,400 families with young children in San Marcos province, Peru. With this study, the research team will not only learn about the potential reach and impact of the app, but will also collect feedback from local communities to further improve the app’s ability to support children’s healthy development. In the future, similar platforms could be scaled broadly to reach families in remote or diverse settings and at a relatively small cost.
Banner image above: A family in the San Marcos region of Peru.
