CMC ties with IIIT LTRC to develop multilingual app for patients

Chennai, Jul 14 (PTI) A multi-partner consortium led by Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore, in collaboration with IIIT Hyderabad’s Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC), is developing BandhuCare – a multilingual AI companion that answers patients' queries in their own language, among others. It also captures their symptoms through natural conversations, and helps clinicians understand what happens between hospital visits. The partnership began when CMC approached IIIT-H for help in translating patient information sheets and consent documents into Indian languages, a release here on Tuesday said. For hospitals serving patients from across the country, communicating complex medical information in a patient's own language had long been a challenge. At the same time, for researchers at LTRC, it was an opportunity to develop language technologies in a real-world setting. "We realised there was tremendous scope for language technology to make a difference in healthcare in India, a domain previously unexplored," said Prof Dipti Misra Sharma, who has been heading machine translation efforts at IIIT-H. The collaboration eventually grew into a formal MoU. While CMC provided domain expertise and anonymised medical data, IIIT-H developed machine translation technologies that could be refined using continuous feedback from clinicians. Over the years, that relationship has evolved alongside advances in language AI. "What started as machine translation with VaidyaDesk, an internal multilingual translation interface that allows hospitals to translate patient-facing documents, gradually expanded into multilingual patient communication, clinical decision support and conversational AI, laying the foundation for BandhuCare," Sharma added. PTI SNR SNR SA