‘ICT and Technological Advances for Ayurveda Education and Practice: Status, Challenges and Scope’

Abstract

Ayurveda the 5000 year old health and medicine discipline of Indian sub-continent is now a recognized TRM (Traditional medicine) system by WHO at a global platform. Ayurveda Education has long history of 5000 years, whereas the formal education of Ayurveda in India (BAMS and MD Ayurveda) has recent History. The earlier Central Council of Indian Medicine (CCIM) and now National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM) are two key regulatory bodies in India responsible for overseeing education, practice, and standards in Ayurveda. Relevance of Ayurved has not faded over thousands of years simply because the time to time contemporization of Ayurveda that was done by its scholars with new scientific lights and with incorporation of modern tools. ICT has made revolution in Ayurveda Education process and technological advances for research have made same in machinery and devices in Pharmaceuticals and Panchakarma therapeutics. Today we are able to see the Microprocessor based modern Shirodhara (pouring medicated oil on forehead) unit with Digital Temperature Controllers replacing traditional Shirodhara unit. Majority of devices used in Pharmaceutical industry are outcomes of systems, control and product engineering. Use of ICT on other hand has come up with Ayurveda knowledge digitization, use of Informatics; emerge of many decision support systems & mobile phone applications in last few decades. Along with Education, Research is another field that has undergone change due to ICT. Unlike western biomedicine, decision making in Ayurveda diagnostics and therapeutics is non-linear and involves multiple variables and thus use of AI for same is a great scope. While world has now recognized and adopted ‘Systems Biology’ an integrative, nonlinear model of biology, ‘Ayurveda and mechatronics’ can have dialogue even at their epistemological level. This paper reviews examples of ICT applications in Ayurveda Education and technological advances for Ayurveda education and Research and evaluates challenges and scope of same.