East Siang District Hosts Comprehensive Training on AI-Enabled Newborn Anthropometry and Digital Health Tools

In a significant stride toward modernizing grassroots healthcare, the Department of Health and Family Welfare of Arunachal Pradesh, with technical backing from Wadhwani AI, successfully conducted a comprehensive three-day training program from September 29 to October 1 across the Ruksin, Pasighat, and Mebo blocks of the East Siang district to bolster newborn care through advanced digital technology and artificial intelligence. Spread across three batches and training 108 ASHAs alongside 15 ASHA facilitators and key district officials, the initiative introduces the ‘Shishu Mapan’ application, an innovative tool integrating Home-Based Newborn Care (HBNC) with a groundbreaking Newborn Anthropometry AI (NBA) tool. Designed to empower frontline health workers, the application can accurately capture critical newborn parameters—including weight, length, head circumference, chest circumference, and mid-upper arm circumference—for infants aged zero to forty-two days using just a short video of fifteen to twenty seconds. Furthermore, the platform features a digitized HBNC recording system that streamlines electronic documentation, enhances data accessibility, and significantly strengthens the real-time monitoring of community-level newborn care services by both healthcare workers and program managers. Prior to this rollout, field-based model contextualization was rigorously conducted across several districts like Namsai, Papum Pare, East Siang, West Siang, and Changlang to tailor and validate the AI application specifically for the unique population characteristics and geographical field conditions of Arunachal Pradesh. Following its current implementation and scale-up phase in the East Siang and West Siang districts, the state health department plans to evaluate the application’s usability, accuracy, field-level feasibility, and local acceptability, with future prospects of expanding the transformative technology-driven newborn healthcare initiative to other districts across the state.