From Development to Deployment of AI-Assisted Telehealth and Screening for Vision and Hearing-Threatening Diseases in Resource-Constrained Settings: Field Observations, Challenges and Way Forward
Published in International Workshop on Medical Image Computing in Resource Constrained Settings (MIRASOL), Springer, 2026, 2026
Recommended citation: Shakya, Mahesh, Bijay Adhikari, Nirsara Shrestha, Bipin Koirala, Arun Adhikari, Prasanta Poudyal, Luna Mathema, Sarbagya Buddhacharya, Bijay Khatri, and Bishesh Khanal. "From Development to Deployment of AI-Assisted Telehealth and Screening for Vision and Hearing-Threatening Diseases in Resource-Constrained Settings: Field Observations, Challenges and Way Forward." (2026) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-13654-1_31
Vision- and hearing-threatening diseases cause preventable disability, especially where specialists and screening facilities are scarce. AI-assisted screening and telehealth could widen early detection, but deploying them in paper-based workflows is hard and little field experience has been documented. This paper reports field observations from developing and deploying such a system, the challenges met, and the way forward.