Altefi is a user friendly, cost-effective tool aimed at improving the communication between cleft palate patients and their orthodontists. Children with cleft palate go through a very lengthy and complex process that includes multiple surgeries, therapy sessions, and orthodontic treatments. Smile Train is an NGO dedicated to providing free, comprehensive care for children going through this process from birth to adulthood. Dr Juan Pablo Gomez Arango alongside other orthodontists in Columbia and Mexico have been leading a pilot program testing aligner technology with their cleft patients.
A current issue that this program is facing is poor quality of images sent from the patients to the doctors, preventing them from performing proper diagnostics. Altefi improves the efficiency of tele-orthodontics by providing an intuitive and user friendly app that guides the patient and their caretaker through the photo taking process. Furthermore, this software also uses photo alternating algorithms that enhance the photos once they are received by the doctors through a web portal.
By streamlining this process and increasing the quality of the images, the number trips to the orthodontist needed by the patients will be reduced. This alleviates the financial and time burden of one step of the many steps of this lengthy process and consequently will reduce the dropout rate from the Smile Train program.