Healthcare Research at MSR India

At Microsoft Research Lab India, we conduct a variety of healthcare related research, including smartphone-based low-cost diagnostics, generative AI chatbots to support the healthcare ecosystem, and promote mental well-being of employees.

Low-cost diagnostics

Healthcare is not accessible to a huge population across the globe. There are a variety of reasons for that including skewed doctor-to-patient ratio, unskilled to semi-skilled healthcare workers, long waiting and long commute to see a doctor which also results in loss of income for daily wage earners. Our aim is to democratize healthcare. And our vision is to develop low-cost smartphone-based diagnostic solutions with AI assistant embedded in them, to enable community health workers, teachers, primary clinicians, and even Swiggy/Amazon delivery personnel, to perform preliminary screening of certain diseases with minimal training. With that vision in mind, over the past four years, we have been working towards developing a variety of diagnostics tool—detecting keratoconus using a smartphone-based corneal topographer (SmartKC (opens in new tab)), estimating refractive errors (Auto-Retinoscopy (opens in new tab)), computing the dryness level of the eye, classifying crackle and wheeze lung sound (RespireNet (opens in new tab)), and estimating height (opens in new tab) of children for malnutrition prediction—all using smartphone. These works has been done in close collaboration with hospitals like Sankara Eye Hospital and NGO’s like WeltHungerHilfe.

HealthBots

Recent studies have highlighted that over 80% of patients and their caregivers require timely, trustworthy, detailed, and accurate information about their treatment. The provision of such information holds the potential to alleviate pre- and post-operative anxiety. To address this issue, we designed and developed chatbots, powered by state-of-the-art generative AI models fine-tuned on the doctor’s provided knowledge base. These HealthBots aims to assist patients and their caregivers in obtaining answers to their queries regarding pre- and post-treatment. Throughout the process, doctors and patient coordinators need to actively participate, offering feedback on the bot’s generated answers to improve the quality of responses over time. The bots are designed to be multimodal and multilingual. Learn more about the HealthBots project.

Mental health

How can organizations take responsibility for employees’ mental well-being? Learn more about the Zen project.