Dr. Ruchit Agrawal

Assistant Professor and Head of CS Outreach, University of Birmingham Dubai

“Dubai’s dynamic and futuristic cross-sectoral vision is what pulled me here from Oxford in 2022. As an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham Dubai, I am very excited about building research solutions to problems pertinent to the region. My project, titled KAMAL Health (Knowledge Augmented Multi-Modal Arabic LLMs for Healthcare), is an endeavour towards Arabic AI technologies for the healthcare sector, and I look forward to developing innovative solutions to improve patient outcomes and foster the integration of AI-powered platforms with healthcare systems within the UAE and beyond.”

The proposed project aims to develop "KAMAL Health” (Knowledge-Augmented Muli-Modal Arabic LLMs for Healthcare), an advanced bilingual, multi-modal medical platform designed in alignment with the local needs of the United Arab Emirates, supporting Arabic as well as English. In addition to text-based chat, KAMAL Health will also support voice-mode with enhanced accessibility to the diverse diaspora of the UAE, making healthcare more accessible and personalized.

KAMAL Health will integrate neuro-symbolic AI approaches, combining the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with classical machine learning methods, ensuring high-quality, transparent, and interpretable medical recommendations. The current landscape of healthcare AI models lacks robust solutions for multi-modal personalized medical recommendations and speech-based health diagnostics and are primarily focused on English. KAMAL Health directly addresses this gap by creating specialized, innovative models that combine deep learning techniques with medical domain expertise to create a platform that provides context-aware healthcare consultations and provides information about local doctors and hospitals when appropriate. Additionally, KAMAL Health introduces voice-mode, i.e. the ability to interact with the user in Arabic via verbal communication, in addition to textual communication, which is not readily available in current platforms.

The inclusion of both English and Arabic makes this platform a unique solution for Dubai's highly diverse population, promoting inclusivity and improving public health for residents across linguistic divides. The project will serve as a key enabler of AI-driven healthcare innovation, improving accessibility to medical services, and reducing the strain on healthcare providers as well as easing mental anxiety of patients with relatively benign ailments. It will also create new opportunities for further research in AI healthcare technologies and have a cross-sectoral impact on related clinical applications. Additionally, KAMAL Health brings a strong potential for commercialization of the bilingual models and sets a precedent for the integration of AI in public health systems.