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Dettol Banega Swasth India Hygieia AI Chatbot: A Milestone In India’s Digital Hygiene Efforts
New Delhi: Dettol Banega Swasth India takes a giant leap forward with its 12th session, launching Hygieia, a pioneering AI chatbot that teaches children the importance of hygiene in 22 regional & 4 global languages. The Hygieia for Good Hygiene initiative marks a significant milestone in India’s journey towards improving digital hygiene. It’s the country’s first WhatsApp bot available in 22 regional and four global languages, using culturally tailored, hyper-local nudges to promote hygiene among children. Powered by open-source generative AI (LLaMA 3.2), Hygieia offers safe, ethical, and engaging conversations to raise awareness and encourage behavioural change.
Building On A Legacy of Success
Building on 11 years of success with the Dettol Banega Swasth India programme, this innovative platform leverages AI to create a secure, scalable ecosystem for child health education across India. Its core aim is to empower millions of children to become hygiene champions through personalised, AI-driven learning.
Supporting India’s Viksit Bharat@2047 vision, this initiative focuses on four key areas:
- Digital Health: Enhancing health awareness through AI integration within India’s digital ecosystem
- Equal Access: Providing hygiene education in all 22 Indian languages for everyone
- Child-Focused Innovation: Developing a safe, AI-based health platform specifically for children
- Community Change: Empowering children to influence their families, creating a broad social impact
Transforming Outreach and Engagement
Traditional health education programmes often face challenges in reaching diverse populations due to limited accessibility, static content, and scalability issues. Hygieia addresses these by leveraging AI technology to enable personalised learning, multilingual accessibility, and real-time data analytics. This approach enhances engagement, broadens reach, and offers actionable insights for the continuous improvement of health education nationwide.
India’s First Child-Safe AI Health Platform
Hygieia offers a comprehensive, WhatsApp-integrated AI chatbot that ensures natural, conversational interactions. It supports 22 Indian languages and four international languages, including English, Spanish, Mandarin, and French, with cultural localisation for seamless communication across communities. The platform prioritises child safety and makes healthcare accessible to all.
The chatbot, built on the proven DBSI framework, covers:
- Personal Hygiene: Promoting daily health practices
- School Hygiene: Ensuring cleanliness within educational environments
- Home Hygiene: Enhancing family health at home
- Illness Management: Guiding users through health crises and prevention
- Community Leadership: Encouraging social responsibility and neighbourhood transformation
Phased Deployment Strategy
Hygieia will roll out in phases to ensure effective scaling:
- Initial Phase (6 months): Pilot launch supporting seven languages, including English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, and Odia.
- Second Phase (6–12 months): Expansion to all 22 Indian languages, integration with the national school network, and advanced analytics.
- Final Phase (12+ months): Scaling up to reach 30 million children, with enhanced personalisation, further integration with national health initiatives, and ongoing improvements.
Child-Friendly Engagement
Children can register easily with parental consent via OTP. They will participate in daily activities such as interactive Q&A sessions on hygiene topics and access fun educational resources like comics, games, and music.
Unique Selling Points
- Innovative and Unique: The world’s first AI-powered hygiene chatbot designed specifically for children
- Multilingual Support: Available in all 22 Indian languages & 4 global languages
- Child Safety: Prioritises privacy and safety, avoiding personal data collection
- Culturally Relevant: Content reflects local customs and traditions
Child-Friendly Design
Conversations are tailored for children aged 6 to 14, with strong safety features to protect young users. The platform personalises content to keep children engaged and tracks progress through real-time data.
Tech-Driven and Scalable
Continuously improving through advanced AI, Hygieia is scalable on the cloud to support millions of users, ensuring broad reach and impact. Hygieia for Good Hygiene is more than just technology, it’s a new way to teach children about health. Through this innovative approach, we aspire to create a model that can be replicated globally to enhance child health and hygiene.
NDTV – Dettol have been working towards a clean and healthy India since 2014 via the Banega Swachh India initiative, which in its Season 10 is helmed by Campaign Ambassador Ayushmann Khurrana. The campaign aims to highlight the inter-dependency of humans and the environment, and of humans on one another with the focus on One Health, One Planet, One Future – Leaving No One Behind. It stresses on the need to take care of, and consider, everyone’s health in India – especially vulnerable communities – the LGBTQ population, indigenous people, India’s different tribes, ethnic and linguistic minorities, people with disabilities, migrants, geographically remote populations, gender and sexual minorities. In a world post COVID-19 pandemic, the need for WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) is reaffirmed as handwashing is one of the ways to prevent Coronavirus infection and other diseases. The campaign will continue to raise awareness on the same along with focussing on the importance of nutrition and healthcare for women and children, fight malnutrition, mental well-being, self-care, science and health, adolescent health & gender awareness. Along with the health of people, the campaign has realised the need to also take care of the health of the eco-system. Our environment is fragile due to human activity, which is not only over-exploiting available resources, but also generating immense pollution as a result of using and extracting those resources. The imbalance has also led to immense biodiversity loss that has caused one of the biggest threats to human survival – climate change. It has now been described as a “code red for humanity.” The campaign will continue to cover issues like air pollution, waste management, plastic ban, manual scavenging and sanitation workers and menstrual hygiene. Banega Swasth India will also be taking forward the dream of Swasth Bharat, the campaign feels that only a Swachh or clean India where toilets are used and open defecation free (ODF) status achieved as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, can eradicate diseases like diahorrea and the country can become a Swasth or healthy India.
