IIITH secures funding from Centific for AI Malnutrition detection project

Hyderabad: The Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS) at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH) has received approximately Rs 18 lakhs in funding from Centific. The support from Centific will advance the project's initial phase, which includes platform development, pilot deployment, data collection, performance optimization, and prototype delivery within an estimated timeframe of six months.

IIIT Hyderabad has partnered with i-Saksham, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering women and enhancing educational opportunities in Bihar, to align with the New Education Policy's focus on foundational learning outcomes. This collaboration aims to improve growth monitoring, enhance data accuracy, and provide reliable data to government agencies for effective interventions to combat malnutrition.

The current manual workflows for obtaining and recording height and weight measurements have led to data-entry errors by frontline staff like Anganwadi workers. Additionally, maintaining measuring tools has been problematic, resulting in unreliable data. The project aims to minimize these errors by automating the process of recording height and weight information from the measuring device to the database.

Prof Ramesh Loganathan, Professor of Practice at IIIT Hyderabad, expressed gratitude for Centific's support, emphasizing its importance in aiding NGOs with the latest technology.

Dr Dinesh Chandrasekar, Chief Strategy Officer at Centific, highlighted the company's commitment to leveraging AI for social good and expressed readiness to provide technical expertise for the initiative.

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) is an autonomous research university founded in 1998, focusing on core areas of Information Technology and their applications in other domains through interdisciplinary research.