Early childhood is a critical period for establishing lifelong health and developmental potential, with the ages 0 - 3 representing a particularly vital window. China's maternal and child health (MCH) system, with its extensive coverage,well-established technical training, service delivery, and supervisory management, provides a crucial platform for promoting early childhood development (ECD) practices. However, community-based services continue to face challenges, including resource disparities, inconsistent standards, and a lack of support for specialized nurturing care. Supported by the "Rural Revitalization——Primary ECD Project" (jointly implemented by the National Health Commission, the State Council Working Committee on Women and Children, and the National Administration for Rural Revitalization) and funded by UNICEF, National Children's Medical Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine developed and implemented a community-based ECD service and monitoring system deeply integrated with artificial intelligence (AI). This work was based on a multicenter, cluster randomized study conducted across three pilot counties in Zhejiang, Henan, and Guizhou provinces. Utilizing a distributed microservices architecture, the system integrates four core functional modules: standardized clinical consultation, digital nurturing care groups, multidimensional assessment, and intelligent supervision. Furthermore, it innovatively incorporates advanced AI applications, including a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based intelligent consultation assistant, multimodal developmental risk prediction models, and automated parent-child interaction analysis. During the pilot period, the system facilitated over 15 000 pediatric consultations and nearly 4 200 nurturing care sessions. These results demonstrate that this AI-empowered network effectively enhances the coverage, standardization, and precision of interventions in community-based services, while also improving user satisfaction, thereby providing a scalable digital solution for primary care implementation and national child health promotion.
Key words
early childhood development /
brain intelligence development /
artificial intelligence /
child healthcare /
information system
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