#DIGITAL PILL REMINDER BOX ARCHIVE#
#DIGITAL PILL REMINDER BOX TRIAL#

We are currently validating the first phase where the AI can tell a normal and an abnormal chest x-ray apart,” he added. The difficulty lies in teaching the algorithm the differences in physiology of people that are not necessarily pathological.

#DIGITAL PILL REMINDER BOX ARCHIVE#

“We have been using the normal X-rays taken during the active case-finding survey and the abnormal ones from our archive to train the AI. “We will build on the AI in three stages – in stage one, we will teach the algorithm to distinguish between normal and abnormal chest X-rays in stage two, we will teach it to identify what the abnormality is and hopefully, in stage three, we will be able to teach it to identify TB as opposed to say a malignancy in the lung in an X-ray,” said Dr G Narendran, who heads the clinical team at NIRT. With thousands of X-rays collected as part of clinical trials and the national active case-finding survey, scientists from NIRT are now trying to create digital copies and train AI tools to identify normal and abnormal X-rays.

“However, those with small one-room houses did not want to keep the huge boxes for fear that others would come to know that they had TB,” he said.ĭr Rajendra Joshi, deputy Director-General, National TB Elimination Programme, said innovations such as MERM could help in urban settings where many people do not allow ASHA workers to come to their homes due to the stigma associated with TB.Īlso in Cutting Edge | Poop therapy can save your gut, and your life The internal partitions also helped the patients in organising and storing multiple drugs needed for the treatment of multi-drug resistant TB.

#DIGITAL PILL REMINDER BOX TRIAL#

The field trial found that most patients appreciated the need for fewer visits to their healthcare centres only to collect the medicines and get tested, said Dr Karikalan.

Through interviews with the participants, healthcare workers, and analysis of the quantity of medicine in the urine of the patients, we found that there was a 70 to 80 per cent adherence,” said Dr N Karikalan, head of the department of social and behavioural research at ICMR-NIRT. “The trial was to essentially see whether the use of the box was acceptable to the patients and whether it actually led to proper adherence to the treatment course even without the supervision of healthcare workers. Scientists from NIRT conducted a trial of the medicine boxes, referred to as Medication Event Reminder Monitor (MERM), in patients with multi-drug resistant TB in Chennai and Mumbai. With TB patients being required to take their pills for six months to a couple of years, medicine fatigue and people giving up midway is well documented. Must read | New TB test kit can detect latent infection

Digital pill reminder box