LukThamDai

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 apply 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.

Our solution is a hybrid service, offering service based on both AI ChatBot and consulting team, aimed to reach out to middle and lower-income families, especially those who live outside the city.  

Mainly focus on monitoring and promoting when signed of delayed in children's developmental milestones from birth to 7 years old, customized to their children's current age by pushing friendly notifications 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 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 caregivers.

However, alongside the AI Chatbot, parents and caregivers can opt-out and make direct consultations about their concerns with the agent in 1:1 service.  

LukThamDai targets to work with all parents and caregivers, especially those who have limitations to access to public health services. 

The key feature of the AI chatbot, it will make tracking and observing easier and more convenient by

1. With the simplicity of AI Chatbot on the LINE messaging platform, it allows the parent to have ease of use, no download required, and be able to adapt to any model of the mobile device. 
2. Increasing parents' understanding of the importance and stimulating children's development at a particular age by recluster the information of children's development. They will learn new knowledge as their child grows. No hassle. 
3. Reducing restrictions on access to public healthcare services in child development management to reduce the risk of developmental delay and give the children the opportunity to develop their full potential.
4. Allow parents or caregivers to have the opportunity to observe and monitor their child's development without having to lose other opportunities such as job absence, daily wages, or even the cost of the hospital trip.

Based on current user feedback, the service is reliable, easy to use, very useful and most of all - peace of mind- which is very important for all new parents.

As a founder, my inspiration is my boy who has a high functioning spectrum. He was diagnosed when he is 7 years old which is a slight delay timeline. Even though I am a well-educated mom but I do too much reliance on the medical service to keep track of my children. Now he is 14 years old and growing up beautifully so I think I should help encourage other parents to acknowledge the importance of children's developmental milestones in all areas. 

Together with other concerned parents, we start to shout out and found out that without the friendly tool and services, It will be hard for parents to track their child's development properly.

As a first step, we receive a small amount of funding from a government unit called The Equitable Education Fund, Thailand for 6,000 USD.

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

1. In order to take their child to see a pediatrician, 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.

Furthermore, we team up with the government units as follows;  

1. The National Institute of Child Development, the Ministry of Public Health gives permission to use the content of the Developmental Surveillance and Promotion Manual (DSPM) to provide on LukThamDai service
2. National Health Foundation to run a Pilot project in a remote area in the south of Thailand - Pattani Province  - to collect data to see the frequency in the areas of delayed development and relationship with age. 
3. Educational Psychology and Counseling faculty of  SriNakarinwirot University to support parents consulting service. 

The outcome is users gain confidence in the service and a good user-journey experience, as well as the solution, which somehow helps remove the limitation of public health care service.

We see the potential of the solution to help overcome this barrier and we do need support in both coaching and financing as well as networking in order to reach our target of providing service to all Thai parents as well as our neighboring country especially Laos which has a very similar in demographic and culture.

What does make Lukthamdai's solution innovative? 

Because we simplified the complicated process of monitoring children's development milestones by adopting simple yet friendly technology as an AI chatbot to provide the solution. 

A: Benefit for parents is the equitization opportunity 

Due to the shortage of pediatricians in Thailand, the service is mostly available mainly in the city.  In some rural areas, there is only a pediatrician one visit per month to the sub-district-promoting hospital. With this solution, every parent will be able to reach the primary service of monitoring children's developmental milestones at no extra cost. 

Furthermore, especially new parents, we always looking for someone to talk to when we do have concerns; more specifically about our children. Somehow, with the limitation of available Health care providers, it is hard to find them to listen to us. 

With Chatbot, we could talk with them anytime, asking them questions, sometimes we might not be able to get the answer we want right away but at least we could release the burden in our minds and go to sleep. 

For our user feedback, there are 4  keywords about the LukThamDai service; 

1. reliable
2. user friendly
3. Useful
4. Create peace of mind

B: Benefit for scientific,   raw data gathering could not be easier. 

in the registration process, the system collects the following data;

1. Child's date of birth
2. Address up to sub-district
3. The development process of each child 

With these pieces of information, we can analyze the pattern of delayed development in children by age group, development area, and by geography which will lead us to be able to develop a protection plan, designed specifically for each need. 

As a result, LukThamDai's solution will be impacted individual families and also impact the system of health services, especially by reducing the workload on health workers. 

From Dashboard, we can provide the number of active users, retained users, and the number of children who received encouraging development and be back on track.

With these numbers, it represents the solution's progress and impact. It can help ensure the well-being of children from birth to 7 years old.

LukThamDai's scenario is 

"We will provide the right tool and supporting service to all the parents who have children at the age from birth to 7 years old to help them to monitor and promote their children's developmental milestones in the most efficient ways"

Our LukThamDai solution is working based on AI Chatbot on messaging platform which could be adapted to work on any messaging platform. 

Yes, that's simple. 

LukThamDai is working with a Thai company named "BotNoi"  https://botnoi.ai/ to specifically designed the dialogue flow in an AI chatbot that aims to collect user data to study delays in children's development patterns to create a protection plan for each need. 

Their incentive comes in a licensing fee based on the number of users.  

With our current situation, we pay 30 USD monthly. 

At LukThamDai, we value everyone's voice. As a mother of a teenager, I adapt my every life to my working lifestyle, very simple, if you want more from them, listen to more from them. 

As the service itself is aimed at the low-income user, the business model we deployed is service subsidization from both able-to-pay users and private organizations. 

From January 2022 to now, we make a change in 1,500+ Thai families and helps at least 500 kids to develop their abilities in all areas at the moment they have delayed in children developmental milestones. 

However, to be a sustainable service, we plan to increase our customer base to 10,000 users by the end of the Year 2022. 

Traction plan is 

1. Extend user demographic; Our majority of the user is in their 25 - 35 years old and somehow we currently have about 19% of active users in a grandparent group. 
2. Partner with the National institute of child development to introduce LukThamDai service through the channel of the sub-district health-promoting hospital aims to help reduce unnecessary jobs for health workers.  

Y. 2023 plan: Business Model: Freemium 

Provide a monitor children's developmental milestones service on AI chatbot for free to all users. 

Introduce a new service, together with Rajanukul Institute to offer the 30 days intensive hybrid program for promoting child development to parents who are in need.  Targeting 10% of the current users will be applied to the new service. Revenue projection at 15,000  USD/ yearly 

From May 2021 to July 2022, we received grants  at a total of 22,500 USD  from the government unit and private organizations as follows; 

1. The school of Changemaker
2. The Equitable Education Funds
3. BanPuCampaignforChange 11 - BanPu Public Company Limited  with CSR package at the amount of 8,000 USD