Aarogya Aarohan

Aarogya Aarohan is an AI-powered mobile application developed under IISc's AI Centre of Excellence initiative — sponsored by Niti Aayog and ICMR — to tackle India's oral cancer crisis. India records an estimated 77,000 new cases and 52,000 deaths from oral cancer annually, with late diagnosis being the primary cause of mortality. The app puts early-detection capability directly in the hands of frontline ASHA workers operating in rural, low-connectivity environments. Field workers photograph patients' oral cavities; an AI model analyses the images and flags high-risk cases for clinical follow-up — with human expert review built in as a safety layer.

India's oral cancer burden is severe and largely silent until it's too late — driven by limited rural healthcare access, low awareness, and widespread tobacco use. The core design challenge was building an app for ASHA workers using low-end personal phones (₹6,000–15,000 range) with 3–4 hours of battery life and intermittent connectivity.

Field research at AIIMS Delhi (Phase 1) revealed that the offline-first approach was creating confusion between synced and unsynced cases. App crashes during incoming calls or multitasking were causing data loss mid-screening. Workers needed a draft feature to safely pause and resume screenings without losing patient data. A second research phase in Krishnagiri, rural Tamil Nadu — covering the villages of Mallapadi and Kanthikuppam — uncovered navigation issues and further gaps in the information architecture that were slowing down screenings in the field.

Phase 1 & 2 focused on stability and trust: integrated a draft-save mechanism to preserve incomplete screenings on interruption, segregated synced and unsynced cases with a clear manual sync button, and simplified navigation to avoid complex nesting on small screens. Rapid wireframe iterations kept pace with research findings.

Phase 3 was a ground-up redesign of the information architecture. I rebuilt the sitemap entirely, adding a Dashboard (screening stats and follow-up tasks), a reworked Cases screen (drafts, submitted, recent) and a new Tasks section (new, pending, completed). New features included Profile management, Notifications, and AI-assisted Follow-up Recommendations. I ran daily huddles with the IISc research team to align technical constraints with design decisions. A custom design system was developed on top of Material Design for the mobile app, with Carbon Design System maintained for the backend (aligned with the MIDAS platform).

Deployed across 5 states — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Assam, and Uttar Pradesh — with hundreds of active ASHA workers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu alone. The app replaced a manual, paper-based screening process, significantly increasing throughput for oral cancer screenings in underserved communities. Research continues with primary users for ongoing iteration.