LukThamDai: AI Chatbot for monitoring child development.

Problem: The increasing number of delayed development children in middle and lower-income families across both Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. The Lack of knowledge, understanding, and inaccessibility of health care services leads to a lack of opportunities for developmental stimulation to reduce the severity of developmental delays in the early stage of life. 

During the past decade, a number of increasingly immutable facts have emerged from child development research, arising from disciplines such as neuroscience, health, psychology, and economics. 

Such research has converged on two important findings: that the early years of child brain development provide a unique and cost-effective window of opportunity for intervention to promote better adult outcomes, and that children's developmental trajectories can be influenced by socio-environmental factors, including the families and communities in which they live. These findings are applicable to all children across all contexts.

Subsequently, this research has increased the demand for interventions that support early childhood development. A complementary body of intervention evidence exists for potentially effective programs and policies that can positively affect children's development across high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries. 

The 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have further contributed to this ambition, especially SDG3 (health) and SDG4 (education), which are intrinsically and fundamentally linked to young children.

SDG 4.2 highlights the importance of assessing both access and quality of early childhood care, development, and education services, and early childhood development for all children. This target has generated high demand for tools that can monitor children's development.

However, to date, especially low-income and middle-income families still have barriers to assessing early childhood development including the scarcity of cross-culturally appropriate tools that are also feasible and affordable with good psychometric properties. Most of the currently available tools were developed in high-income settings.

The needs for promising tools and robust evaluations are a crucial starting point together with programs that include effective monitoring of both processes, implementation, and outcomes, early childhood development.

Solution: AI ChatBot solution to reach out to middle and lower-income families. Mainly focus on monitoring children's developmental milestones from birth to 7 years old, customized to their children's current age by pushing friendly notification on the messaging platform - LINE Application which is widely adopted in all state countries - where the mobile application is not widely popular. 

With the notification pushed directly to their phone, the parents will be encouraged to monitor their child's development at a particular age marker at home, at their own time, and at no extra cost. 

Chatbot solution will guide them step by step on where to look to observe and monitor their child's development covering all areas from cognitive, physical movement, social and emotional, and language and communication, to ensure that the child is roughly on track for their age, if not, the bot will guide a parent through the step of how they can promote their child development with activities aimed to minimize the gap that occurs between a child’s ability and those of their same-aged peers, the confidence of the child as well as the frustration that can be encountered by the child’s parents and/or care-givers.

The chatbot will make tracking and observing easier and more convenient by 

Increasing understanding of the importance and stimulating the children's development at a particular age.

Reducing restrictions on access to public healthcare services in child development management to reduce the risk of developmental delay and to give the children the opportunity to develop their full potential.

There is 24% of children from birth to 5 years old in Thailand that missed the opportunity to observe their developmental milestones so the chatbot will allow parents or care-giver to have the opportunity to observe and monitor their child development without having to lose other opportunities such as job absent, daily wages or even cost for the hospital trip. 

LukThamDai started as a mother who has first-hand experience encountering limitations in child development from birth to seven years old and found that the lack of knowledge and understanding of the importance of monitoring child development in the early stage of life impacted everyone's life in the family.

We initiate the project by fielding to understand the problems and needs of the target users. consequently, found 2 key factors are following; 

1) Parents or caregiver might miss their daily income wages if they take an absence from work. 

2) The unfamiliar with mobile application downloading and usage

As a result, we start prototyping with Chatbot on Line messaging platform which is very popular in Thailand as an ideal tool because we can connect between parents and children development specialists through the solution.

As a result, users gain confidence in the service and good user-journey experience, as well as the solution, helps remove the limitation of public health care service.

With access to strategic experts, coaching as well as networks to guide and support in both technology, marketing, and finance,  LukThamDai will be able to help parents to gain confidence in helping their children. 

The solution will support the parents of young children to learn about child development, recognize the milestones their child should be reaching, and guide them about what to do to excel in their child's development and what to act if they ever become concerned.

The significant impacts on parents are: 

1. Customized service to their child's age will create no hassle for the parents

2 Easy to use: Chatbot solution is familiar and easy to adopt by the target user.

3. No extra cost: Parents could monitor their child's development at their own time, place, and availability. No need to skip day work, no traveling cost. 

The significant and most important impact is on children: With the opportunity for early intervention, to promote their development for a better quality of life in the future. Acting early could make a real difference.

The impact goals are that each parent gains knowledge and confidence to help their children grow and thrive. Parents know their children best. 

We, LukThamDai, plan to achieve it  by the following: 

1. Improve the chatbot to be more humanized. Improve User journey and add more content variety. 

2. Promote the tool across social media platforms, currently, we are doing it thru Facebook, and LINE Voom. Expand the community, Created more engagement content

3. Working closely as a supporter of the national health care system.

From the pilot project, we do research on both the in-depth interview and questionnaire to measure the parents' knowledge of children's development in each stage before and 60 days after they used the service. 

Approximately 80% of participants gain more knowledge of child development and realize the signs of concern. 

While up to 70% of participants gain confidence in helping their children to excel or meet their development milestones.

LukThamDai is working on AI-Powered Chatbot - an intent-based solution to make the tools behave more like humans. 

- Service is available 24/7  with instant response

- Personalize and create engagement with a one-on-one conversation. Give a personal touch to the conversation.

- With the machine learning ability, LukThamDai could be expanding its reach to new markets or territories by answering queries in the language of customers.

- Simple to scale in the future.

Sustainable financially Strategy: 

1 focus on providing access to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it while establishing creative but lower production and marketing costs with high operating efficiencies. Supported from a government grant and working as a partner with an educational institution. 

2 Service Subsidization by selling related consulting services related to children's development to both corporate and individual. 

Our successes so far are

1. Received a grant from Equitable Education Fund ( EEF) in Thailand for developing a prototype.

2. Co-partner with Rajanukul Institute - https://th.rajanukul.go.th/ , The government agency under the Department of Mental Health, MOPH, provides knowledge, services, early intervention, and child skills training with proper methods.

3. Co-Partner with  The Department of Special Education, Faculty of Education, Srinakarinwirot University http://specialed.edu.swu.ac.th...