How Logy.AI's '' AI Tooth doc'' with Colgate is transforming oral healthcare. A tribute on world oral health day!

1.Background:?

Which of the following you think is the most common disease in the world?

Diabetes? Heart diseases? Cavities? Gum diseases? Arthiritis?

You will be suprised to know!

Cavities are the most common disease in the world,The Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 estimated that oral diseases affect close to 3.5 billion people worldwide, with caries of permanent teeth being the most common condition. Globally, it is estimated that 2 billion people suffer from caries of permanent teeth and 520 million children suffer from caries of primary teeth.

Lets consider the top 5 reasons for the burden of disease:

1. You were not aware of the gravity of the oral problem.
2. No available information or guidance.
3. Not enough professionals reachable.
4. Poor Dental care patterns.
5. Inefficient Patient- dentist communications.

Oral health knowledge is considered to be an essential prerequisite for health related behavior, and sadly not enough solutions are out there to impact positive behaviours.

It has also been indicated the low awareness levels ,having no knowledge of any kind of oral health problems, people are generally unaware of the etiological factors and oblivious about preventive measures for oral care.

?When majority of players chose to use AI in standardised dental images like CBCT , OPGS etc,

We at logy.AI realised that the problem of awareness and instilling positive health behaviour is still lacking in the industry specially in developing nations.

We chose a different approach altogether.?

To maximize the reachability and mass screening , we used following methods:

• We chose to work on smartphone based free-hand images.
• We shifted from physician centric approach to a more patient centric approach.

Why we chose to be more patient centric?

a)There is enough data that tells us lack of awareness and information related to dental diseases is the major reason for delay in treatment, not showing up for follow up and gathering wrong information .

b) We wish to empower the end users/patients to take informed decisions about their health and participate with their doctors for better treatment outcomes.

c) We want to begin care from home.?

d) Lack of enough cost-effective preliminary screening solutions.

e) No digital front doors available for assisting tele-dentistry.

d) Lastly, expanding digital care globally and without boundaries.

2.Oral health screening and rationale to launch the AI bot with Colgate in Nigeria.

In Nigeria there is minimum access to adequate oral health care.

The majority of the affected go untreated . A general lack of awareness and unaffordability of dental care services, and grossly inadequate number of care providers to meet the enormous dental care needs of Nigerians is absent.

Routine dental care check-up is not a well-practiced culture in Nigeria and developing countries as a whole.?

Major reasons being that pain is the main driving reason for seeking dental care/utilising an oral healthcare ecosystem.?

This may be because pain poses an appealing factor for seeking care, as it may be signifying more complex or advanced problems.These factors may result in patients resorting to either unskilled personnel or only reporting when the problem has worsened. Even more, not much attention seems to be given to oral health promotion and awareness in Nigeria as a whole.

Our solution approach:?

1.We have started with targeting two major solutions to impact oral health care delivery.

• Improve the patient -dentist communication and take in charge of dental care patterns
• Build Innovative Information Education and Communication(IEC) efforts to positively influence the oral health habits and perceptions about dental care
• Prevention is the best way to avoid any catastrophic medical expenses.

2.Adressing 5 major perceptions of dental care:

• Cost of care:Most people find the dental treatment to be very expensive.
• Dental treatment being very painful.
• Information asymmetry: An information asymmetry exists as enough information is not available to make an informed choice related to dental treatment.
• We chose to address the above perceptions by going totally digital and free for the end users?

Most dental treatments are seeded towards the end or critical stages of diseases. When preventive care is in demand not enough solutions are working around it. Our vision is to make people aware of the service before they utilize it.

Here is a short video about our AI solution offering:

The application involves 4 main stages as detailed below.

1. Promote Good oral care habits

2. Primary dental diagnosis.

3. Advance dental diagnosis with real dentist

4. Live appointment with dentist

Features of Colgate AI tooth doc app:

• The solution is deployed on whatsapp;?

The major reason being , whatsapp is a simplistic, convenient and better response and engagement. Because of its wider reach, it is a good one-to-one platform for direct communication.

(Note: Yellow.AI is the vendor for the solution deployment on WhatsApp)

• Real time generation of reports: Our patented Dental.AI model can reproduce a real time report and can be delivered via whatsapp.?The report captures the information based on images and shared by the user and with easy to understand interpretable information all delivered on the chatbot.

• On demand services:

If the user is unhappy with screening or has further queries to address we provide easy means to connect with the dentist. All you have to do is register your interest and a dentist will revert back to you in 48 hours.

Digital communications tele-health dashboard for doctors :

Doctors from anywhere can easily access our digital communication platform with the help of mobile phones/laptops and connect with their patients and just a click.

3.Building logy.AI’s dental bot and validation of accuracy:

The two key objectives for the project were set as:

A)Creating an affordable cost-effective solution

B)The solution should be so easy to use that any volunteer (field workers) can use it easily.

The association with Colgate started on May 2020. We are thankful to Vibhanhsu (ex-Manager of Colgate) and Dhruv (current Manager of Colgate) and Vinay (from Yellow.AI) for working with us on a common vision to bring this project to live for the 20 million people in Nigeria who did not have access to dental care.?

Our AI model have been trained on more than 5,000 users data with the help of our amazing team at Logy.AI.?

We would also like to thank the core team of Logy.AI - Anand, Dr Nivedita and Priyanjit who worked tremendously hard to make this a reality.?

?Although the road was not easy to follow, we did encounter few challenges like:

The challenges included:?

• Working with free hand images, this? required us to develop followable protocols.?
• Devise algorithms to give users accurate instructions on how they can improve image quality.
• ?Making the whole process user-friendly at the same time.?
• Doing the whole trial without our own physical presence in? Nigeria and? due to COVID it was very difficult. But with the ever supportive Colgate and Kantar Research team, we were able to get it done successfully.

4.A breakthrough- geting our AI models validated with help of Kantar Global:

Kantar global is world’s leading data, insights company.?

The objectives of the trial with Kantar global was validate the findings given by AI on the oral images.

Approach: The trial was conducted in central Location Lagos Nigeria

Trial was conducted on 100 patients (respondents)

• Stage 1 : Respondents (patients) were recruited based on the oral issue they had and brought to a central location for the purpose of engaging them and taking pictures of their mouth /oral challenge
• Stage 2 : These pictures were then be uploaded to the WhatsApp dentist Platform to obtain initial results from the Preliminary Dental Diagnosis with Artificial Intelligence.
• Stage 3 : Each of the patients were then immediately evaluated by 3 dentists for the oral issues.
• Stage 4 : Tallying of Findings across the 3 conditions of interest vs AI Findings to ascertain level of deviation.

Evaluation tallies by condition (dentist vs AI) findings showed that Logy.AI’s dental.AI bots showed that AI matched 94% of the time with real time diagnosis of dentists. The biggest hurdle to the validity of our AI models was finally approved.

We are more then thrilled to see our vision going live on world Oral health day!

Thank you Colgate Nigeria and Tolaram group for the support and sailing our project live.?

What is the real impact we are excited about?

• We are about to impact 20.6 crores of individuals in Nigeria , sensitise them to oral care and provide free oral health screening with free recommendation of oral products they recommended that best suits them.
• We believe prevention is better than cure. It's affordable too. In fact, preventing future illnesses and preventing complications from existing conditions, are vital to the future sustainability of health systems.
• ?Provide reachability and maximum screening for hassle free community or family screening.

Check out what the awesome team of Logy.AI has to say about the project.

We hope to create impact in bringing more innovations to affordable contactless health screening solutions . Thank you for the love and support!

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