Lalan, Arshika
Improving Health Information Access in the World's Largest Maternal Mobile Health Program via Bandit Algorithms
Lalan, Arshika, Verma, Shresth, Diaz, Paula Rodriguez, Danassis, Panayiotis, Mahale, Amrita, Sudan, Kumar Madhu, Hegde, Aparna, Tambe, Milind, Taneja, Aparna
Harnessing the wide-spread availability of cell phones, many nonprofits have launched mobile health (mHealth) programs to deliver information via voice or text to beneficiaries in underserved communities, with maternal and infant health being a key area of such mHealth programs. Unfortunately, dwindling listenership is a major challenge, requiring targeted interventions using limited resources. This paper focuses on Kilkari, the world's largest mHealth program for maternal and child care - with over 3 million active subscribers at a time - launched by India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and run by the non-profit ARRMAN. We present a system called CHAHAK that aims to reduce automated dropouts as well as boost engagement with the program through the strategic allocation of interventions to beneficiaries. Past work in a similar domain has focused on a much smaller scale mHealth program and used markovian restless multiarmed bandits to optimize a single limited intervention resource. However this paper demonstrates the challenges in adopting a markovian approach in Kilkari; therefore CHAHAK instead relies on non-markovian time-series restless bandits, and optimizes multiple interventions to improve listenership. We use real Kilkari data from the Odisha state in India to show CHAHAK's effectiveness in harnessing multiple interventions to boost listenership, benefiting marginalized communities. When deployed CHAHAK will assist the largest maternal mHealth program to date.
Analyzing and Predicting Low-Listenership Trends in a Large-Scale Mobile Health Program: A Preliminary Investigation
Lalan, Arshika, Verma, Shresth, Sudan, Kumar Madhu, Mahale, Amrita, Hegde, Aparna, Tambe, Milind, Taneja, Aparna
Mobile health programs are becoming an increasingly popular medium for dissemination of health information among beneficiaries in less privileged communities. Kilkari is one of the world's largest mobile health programs which delivers time sensitive audio-messages to pregnant women and new mothers. We have been collaborating with ARMMAN, a non-profit in India which operates the Kilkari program, to identify bottlenecks to improve the efficiency of the program. In particular, we provide an initial analysis of the trajectories of beneficiaries' interaction with the mHealth program and examine elements of the program that can be potentially enhanced to boost its success. We cluster the cohort into different buckets based on listenership so as to analyze listenership patterns for each group that could help boost program success. We also demonstrate preliminary results on using historical data in a time-series prediction to identify beneficiary dropouts and enable NGOs in devising timely interventions to strengthen beneficiary retention.