Leading with AI: Kerala’s Nayanamritham 2.0 - A Government-Led AI-Assisted Chronic Eye Disease Screening Initiative

India bears a disproportionate share of the global burden of visual impairment, with an estimated 8 million blind individuals and over 60 million people with moderate to severe visual impairment, much of which is preventable through early detection and timely care. Chronic eye diseases - particularly diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration - are increasingly responsible for this burden as India undergoes rapid epidemiological and demographic transition. Kerala faces an especially acute risk, with adult diabetes prevalence at 15–20% among the highest in India, yet over 90% of individuals with diabetic retinopathy are unaware of their condition at diagnosis, reflecting silent disease progression in the absence of routine screening. Glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration add to this burden, with late presentation leading to irreversible vision loss and avoidable health-system costs. India's public health system faces structural constraints in delivering systematic eye screening: retinal examination remains concentrated in secondary and tertiary facilities and heavily dependent on ophthalmologists who are unevenly distributed and insufficient relative to population need, while primary care facilities typically lack retinal imaging capacity and conventional outreach models like eye camps provide only episodic access poorly suited to chronic disease management and follow-up.

Remidio Innovative Solutions Pvt Ltd is a Bengaluru-based health technology innovator that developed the MediosHI 3-in-1 Edge AI, a software as a medical device that analyzes retinal images to screen for diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration. The system uses convolutional neural networks trained on over 200,000 retinal images from diverse populations, including data from established datasets such as AREDS and EyePACS, with each image graded by expert ophthalmologists. The solution's offline, on-device architecture enables immediate screening outputs at the point of care without internet connectivity, ensuring consistent performance in real-world conditions. Remidio's technology has been validated through independent clinical evaluations including the NHS landmark study published in The Lancet Digital Health, and is approved by both India's CDSCO and CE-marked in the European Union. Through partnership with the Government of Kerala, Remidio has demonstrated how public-private collaboration can create context-appropriate, scalable solutions that address real operational constraints in public health systems.