Prompts from Jacaranda Health
Free SMS service that provides pregnant women and new mothers with information and quickly routes medical risk signals to a human helpdesk.
About
Prompts sends messages in Kenya tailored to the stage of pregnancy or the postpartum period. Women can ask questions themselves via SMS; a clinical helpdesk responds and refers on when risks are identified. A cluster-randomized controlled trial with 6,139 women across 40 health facilities found modest improvements in knowledge, birth preparation, regular care-seeking, and mother and baby care. This study examined the entire SMS program rather than the isolated effect of the AI, and was not designed to establish an effect on mortality.
AI factor
An NLP pipeline classifies incoming messages by topic and priority and escalates high-risk messages to clinical staff. Jacaranda additionally reports developing its own language model for responses in languages including Swahili. Human care staff assess the signal, respond, and arrange a referral where needed.
Sources
Inspiration sourced from AI For Good. Not an Arnaldus customer case.