Indian-Led Team Wins Healthtech in Action Award for Disease Prevention Mobile App

The app, named fooya!, was tested in an 11-week longitudinal trial conducted at the Panchayat Union Middle School in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai.

An India-led global team of research scientists has been honored with the Health Information Technology in Action award by the Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Health and AI.

The award recognizes their innovative work on a mobile app designed to reduce the risk of infectious diseases among students through gamified virtual reality.

The team, led by inventor and serial deep-tech entrepreneur Bhargav Sri Prakash from FriendsLearn, includes prominent researchers such as Rema Padman from Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College and Dr Rahul Ladhania from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Their peer-reviewed conference paper titled "Effect of AI-Enabled, School-Based, Mobile Health Gameplay on Infectious Disease Knowledge" earned them the award at the 14th Conference on Health IT and Analytics.

Breakthrough with Digital Vaccines

The award-winning research focuses on the use of "digital vaccines," a term coined to describe the app’s ability to lower the incidence of various pathologies through gamified learning.

Sri Prakash emphasized the potential of artificial intelligence in disease prevention, stating, "Our breakthrough with digital vaccines continues to pave new frontiers in showcasing the power of artificial intelligence in preventing disease for future generations around the world, safely, effectively, ethically, and responsibly."

The app, named fooya!, was tested in an 11-week longitudinal trial conducted at the Panchayat Union Middle School (PUMS) in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai.

The study, in partnership with Usha Sriram at the Voluntary Health Services Hospital, Chennai, involved nearly 250 children from grades 1 to 8.

The results demonstrated a significant impact on health learning among the students, highlighting the app's effectiveness in enhancing health literacy.

Future Prospects

Prof Rema Padman noted the global challenge of improving health literacy among both children and adults and the potential of gamified digital therapeutic approaches to address this need.

She emphasized the importance of conducting large-scale experiments in real-world settings to generate strong evidence of the app's benefits.

The success of fooya! has inspired the team to conduct further randomized field trials in the US, India, Botswana, and other countries.

Dr Rahul Ladhania commented on the app's impact, stating, "Our results showed that a mobile game that embeds implicit learning in the game mechanism can positively impact children’s health learning outcomes and showed strong evidence for training students early on."