The Indian Institute of Science has been awarded the Best Education Institute Exhibit of the Year for its innovative AI-based oral cancer screening tool – Aarogya Aarohan at the India Mobile Congress 2025, held from 8 to 11 October 2025 at Yashobhoomi, New Delhi.
Aarogya Aarohan is developed at IISc in collaboration with ARTPARK and Triveous. This is a point-of-care, AI-empowered, white-light, mobile phone–based application for the early detection of oral cancers and oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD). It is being optimized for deployment and clinical validation as an open-source, Class B–certified oral cancer screening tool in Health and Wellness Centres (HWCs) and other primary-care and community settings in India. The solution aims to combine low-cost smartphone-based imaging with AI models tailored to the Indian population, and designed to operate offline in low-connectivity, low-resource environments while supporting multimodal inputs in tertiary care.
The entire field operation of Aarogya Aarohan is run from servers sitting in the CDS Data Center administered by Prof. Debnath Pal’s group. The tech team at ARTPARK deploys the software stack remotely through dedicated access granted to them. This is a joint effort where students from Prof. Debnath Pal’s group are involved in technology development, Prof. Rajesh Sundaresan’s (ECE) AI Model and Prof. Prabhdeep Kaur’s (ICPH) field deployment. There are 8 sites across India where field data are collected.
The Phase 2 of the deployments under the aegis of TANUH (https://www.tanuh.ai/) are in progress. India currently has an estimated 27 Cr population with a habit of chewing tobacco, areca nut, gutka, etc., posing a risk for oral cancer. It is currently the largest contributor (40% of the global burden) to the oral cancer driven mortality. Early detection of lesions related to OPMD can save lives if patients can be alerted early to recuse from their habit. The Aarogya Aarohan tool is meant to bridge this gap and enable lesion detection at the pre-cancer stage.
The Aarogya Aarohan mobile app is available on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.ac.iisc.arogyam
