IWill Raksha: Controlled GenerativeAI Reproductive Health and Agency Assistant with Services in Hindi and English

IWill RAKSHA (Reproductive-health, Agency, Knowledge & Services Health AI-Assistant) is a Complete Controlled Generative OPEN AI based Reproductive wellness, planning pregnancy phase and sexual agency and awareness-based health assistant designed to offer both guided counseling in matters of reproductive health, planning pregnancy, sexual agency for women and men and different gender identities as well as bring aggregated services that are affordable for the user basis their needs.


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IWill RAKSHA currently has two programs focussed on the following segments

1. Planned Pregnancy for better health outcomes for mothers, better child health & care, and happier families

Helping Couples and women in Planning Pregnancy Phase with all aspects covered including physical, emotional, sexual, and financial wellbeing all guided by our OPEN AI-based Controlled Generative AI assistant.

Need

In India 49% of all pregnancies are unplanned becoming the leading cause of maternal health distress, child health complications, and even maternal mortality, as well as poorer household outcomes

2. Enabling Young Adults to have access to SRH services and safe space to build agency and emotional support

Young girls and boys and people with different identities help them explore, learn about their reproductive health, develop safe behaviors for intimacy for self and towards others for better health, develop sexual agency as well as have better emotional and mental health support. This too is all built using Azure bot framework for controlled clinical direction and Open AI generative models for empathy, clinically accurate responses, personalised help and superior outcomes.

Need

This is so important as less than 15% of young girls have access to healthcare, and reproductive healthcare and most care even post-marriage is largely related to pregnancy-related concerns. Young men and people with different gender identities don't have a safe space to explore their health, and their questions regarding sexual agency, emotional wellbeing support, and related services.

Market Size & Impact Goals

IWill RAKSHA's current programs are needed by 500 million people just in India. It aims to help safer pregnancies, reduce maternal health complications, ensure mothers' and family' wellbeing, and bring agency of health, and early detection of any issue for the young generation of India. SRH is a big global focus especially more so for developing nations and/or nations with high populations and this is one of the most impactful areas to work on globally.

Designed for relevance and cutting language barrier

IWill RAKSHA is also Hindi based. Hindi is a language used by 615 million users. We have used the Controlled overall clinical model developed with top behavior change experts, in a human-centered design approach with rules and at clinically relevant places, have used specifically trained OPEN AI models for specific use cases as per the relevance and need and thereby creating highly safe, effective and empathic mental health AI assistant.

Current Backers

IWill Raksha was developed with support from USAID Momentum as part of their Yash Entrepreneurship program managed by Vilgro which also partners with JHIPEGO. And also Generous support from Microsoft's Startup Hub Founder Program.

Our next Steps

Our immediate goal is to ensure a putting in place an automated clinical review and improvement process, publish improvement data, work with several different partners especially public health bodies, governments and NGO and get all regulatory checks in place as well as publish data, knowledge, and champion the use of LLMs like OPEN AI for solving healthcare equity challenges and enable other innovators throughout the world also to be able to create, deploy and develop solutions leveraging the true and for good potential of LLMs.

Team

The team that built IWill RAKSHA is led by Shipra Dawar, founder and CEO of IWill, an influential force in the field of tech for good and mental well-being, reproductive health, and sustainability. Core Team members include Ashish Dwivedi, Co-founder and Business head of IWill, Nayamat Bawa, Head of Therapy, Sai Sanjana Palakodeti, Research and Development Coordinator, Indu Chauhan, Human therapist lead annotator, Namrata Mehta, Manya Chauhan, Karan Talwar, Raj Sharma and more than 15 member team that worked on ensuring that the product built is based on Human Centered Design, high efficacy, ease of use, scalability and cost-effective.

Our mentor for the work is Dr. Rashmi Adrey, a senior public health specialist with a career spanning more than 30 years in the field of human-centered design for public health, direct clinical help through practice, policy work, and helping innovators develop last-mile solutions that resonate

Snapshot of Steps we took to build IWILL RAKSHA

  1. On-ground need-based in-person detailed interviews, discussions, and pain point discussions with targeted users both with planning pregnancy couples, already pregnant women, young boys and girls to ensure, we develop.
  2. Putting a framework- Mentorship, advice correction
  3. Development of a Core Automated Clinical Bot Model
  4. Development of `16 open AI-based specific models for specific use cases of SRH with extensive work on clinical data, model-relevance, testing, feedbacking and improving.
  5. The pilot testing phase with 50 users of IWill Raksha was Completed on Jan 19th, 2024
  6. Current Phase- 360 review and initial scaling

Microsoft Services Used

  1. Azure OpenAI
  2. Azure AI Studio
  3. Azure AI Content Safety
  4. Azure Kubernetes Service
  5. About IWill
  6. Azure Cognitive Services