Salcit Technologies: Swaasa

Problem: Active case finding (ACF) is an established measure for the systematic screening of infectious diseases like TB in high-risk populations by frontline health workers, who are the first point of contact for under-served communities. In 2021, out of 22.3 million patients screened for TB through government programs, 73,772 patients were identified through ACF. However, there has been a lack of affordable, rapid response and sensitive screening tools that can help find the millions of active TB cases that often go undiagnosed. Currently used ACF methods are visual inspection, patient questionnaires, and assessing exposure to TB-infected individuals, but these have limited clinical application due to the subjectivity in understanding patients’ symptoms and systematically deducing test results for identification and differentiation of different lung infections. This leads to about 64% of symptomatic TB patients going undiagnosed.

Solution: Addressing this need, India Health Fund and ACT For Health co-funded the development of Swaasa® – an AI Platform by Salcit Technologies that records cough sounds from patients using a phone’s microphone and analyzes them to decode unique cough signatures to detect the possible presence of pulmonary tuberculosis using a proprietary AI algorithm and gives a report in just a few seconds. Salcit’s non-invasive innovation can run on any smartphone, requires no additional equipment/consumables and offers the key advantage of being used by patients themselves in the confines of their households, reducing the risk of infection spread or the need of for trained staff. It can also be easily used by frontline health workers in low-resource and remote settings and thus, promises to be easily scalable to enable early detection of the disease.

Funding by IHF and ACT For Health will aid Salcit Technologies in the technical validation of the Swaasa®’s AI algorithm. The project will include the collection of cough sounds from about 5700 subjects (TB and Non-TB), the technical validation of the platform across 6 public health centers and the enhancement of the platform to reach an accuracy of 90% for detecting the likely presence of TB.

Unlike other cough screening algorithms coming to the market, Swaasa® is a multi-focus platform that can be used for screening of various lung ailments including COVID-19, for which it is currently undergoing clinical trials. Swaasa® is also registered with CDSCO, is HIPAA and ISO27001 certified and has two granted patents and three publications backing its technology and use. Salcit’s proprietary combination of audiometric analysis and AI technology will undergo two more development phases post the review of the first phase by an external panel of technical experts representing Central TB Division, ICMR and WHO-India, among others.

The project is co-funded by IHF and the non-profit venture philanthropy platform ACT for Health.