HealthBot NG — multilingual AI health triage & care-routing for Nigeria (WhatsApp + USSD, FMOH/WHO-grounded RAG, deterministic safety net). Miva Open University MIT project.
# HealthBot NG
**A Multilingual AI-Powered Health Triage and Care-Routing System for Primary Healthcare Access in Nigeria**
HealthBot NG is a professional master's project from Miva Open University. It
explores multilingual symptom intake, conservative triage and care-level
routing through WhatsApp, USSD and a web-based research console.
> **Academic scope:** HealthBot NG is a research prototype, not a certified
> medical device or clinical service. Its controlled vignette results do not
> establish safety or effectiveness for real patients. It must not be used to
> diagnose, prescribe or replace professional care.
- **Live academic demonstration:**
- **Defence release:**
## Implemented capabilities
- English, Nigerian Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo interaction paths.
- Three care levels: `SELF_CARE`, `CLINIC` and `EMERGENCY`.
- A deterministic multilingual red-flag layer that runs before the model.
- Retrieval-augmented generation over selected FMOH, NCDC and WHO protocols.
- WhatsApp webhook integration and deterministic USSD menus.
- Sample facility routing using geographic distance and care level.
- A research analytics console, native-language review workflow and SUS
questionnaire workflow.
- Authenticated administration, observability, migrations and automated tests.
The configured red-flag matcher provides a reproducible safeguard for the
phrases it recognises; it cannot guarantee detection of every emergency
expression, spelling, dialect or code-switched formulation. Retrieval failure
currently permits an ungrounded model path. Strict grounding and independent
clinical validation are mandatory before any external clinical use.
## Architecture
| Layer | Main responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Access | Twilio WhatsApp webhook, Africa's Talking USSD, web console |
| Reasoning | Conversation control, language handling, LLM parsing, deterministic escalation |
| Knowledge | RAG over a bounded protocol corpus using a hosted or local index |
| Data | SQLAlche …