Exploring Automated Q&A Support System for Maternal and Child Health in Rural India

Providing effective and efficient maternal and child healthcare is a challenge across the world. The challenge is even higher in developing countries, like India, where the doctor-to-patient ratio does not meet WHO prescribed numbers. Inadequate access to medical experts means that even simple queries about healthcare are not answered. In this work, we present our initial findings of using state-of-the-art Q&A systems, like IBM Watson, Rasa, and custom retrieval-based model, for answering simple queries related to maternal and child health. The query database, formed of short questions, is obtained from a real-world experiment where a medical expert answered the questions. The initial results are encouraging and indicate that further research in this area can help to answer a large number of queries thus reducing the work-load on a human medical expert.