Are You Ready to Entrust Your Life to a Medical Chatbot?

It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of the cardinal changes that await us in the nearest future, than digital medicine. Introduction of the modern technologies into medicine is a bright example of the impact of science at the quality of human life.

There are many projects where blockchain and AI algorithms seem literally irreplaceable — it is enough to recall human genome decoding projects or experiments in implementing IBM Watson to the cancer diagnosis.

So what, without a supercomputer a modern medicine cannot do? Advanced startups do not think so! Let us briefly get acquainted with interesting and ambitious projects, ready to make changes to the very notion of medicine and transfer the patient counseling to chat-bots.

Big data, machine learning algorithms, AI routines for image recognition and, of course, intelligent chat-bots are ready not only to become powerful analysis and assistance tools for the doctor, but in some cases, replace the specialist themselves.

Source

Founded in 2014, the X2.AI startup creates chat-bots that can give detailed advice on mental health. The idea itself is not a new one because one of the first chat-bots — Eliza (ELIZA) — developed back in 1966, already performed such a role. At that time, Eliza employed only the active listening technique.

Tess chat-bot, developed by X2.AI, is able to detect patterns in phrasing, typing, length of sentences and even in the number of grammatical errors, revealing dependencies to different emotional states. The definition of hidden emotions is one of the tasks of human therapists and the chat-bot successfully takes this function upon itself.

Due to its round the clock availability, Tess provides patients with a connection to a “virtual psychologist” that monitors the emotional state and is able to signal in time about reaching a level of depression where urgent intervention by a specialist is needed.

The effectiveness of the chat-bot was tested in really stressful conditions: thanks to its multilingual locale (the Arabic language is supported), it was used to provide assistance in Syrian refugee camps. Tess is able to operate through various communication channels, including Facebook Messenger, SMS or directly in a browser — which is especially helpful in areas where the access to the internet is problematic. Users from the Middle East know this chat-bot under the name of Karim.

Depending on the native language of the audience, the goals and tasks of X2.AI chat rooms vary. The Dutch chat-bot — Emma — is designed to counsel users with mild anxiety and fear; English language chat-bot Nema is focused to the easy communication with children who have diseases of the diabetic spectrum.

In terms of business, profiling medical bots to different markets is a healthy pragmatism. While chat rooms designed for crisis zones are provided to users free of charge (all costs are covered by UN charitable missions), others are provided on a franchise basis for clinics and hospitals around the world. Currently the company is preparing for the launch of chat-bots that would aid violence victims in Brazil and help people with HIV in Nigeria.

It can be stated with certainty that with the spread of such medical chat-bots, conducting the humanitarian missions would become simpler and cheaper. Chat-bots do not need to be delivered to crisis zones, they do not need a visa, and in case of difficult situations, the whole conversation can be transferred to an expert doctor.

Source

Babylon is the development of an English company, the subscription healthcare provider. It allows users conducting virtual consultations with doctors and health professionals through text and video chat over their mobile application. Functionality includes the possibility of getting a prescription, making appointments with doctors, choosing (and paying for) the services of medical institutions.

What else can Babylon do? Its services are divided into four types — consultation, monitoring, testing and AI- based functions. In consultation, users can get advice from the chat-bot about the most common symptoms for general medical topics, from allergies to colds. Consultations on mental health are also available; patients can discuss depression or anxiety. Health monitoring collects the general information about the patient: the calorie intake, quality of the sleep, pulse rate and stress level, which can be used to draw up a health plan. Through the Babylon chat-bot, you can order various test kits for self-diagnosis of diseases.

Finally, the functions related to AI allow conducting a preliminary assessment of the health of the user based on the totality of all the available factors. How accurate are Babylon’s predictions? According to a study by Dr. Irwin Nazareth of Oxford University, the accuracy of chat-bot diagnosis was 92% compared to 82% for common practice doctor and 77% for nurse.

Source

Baidu Doctor application was created in 2015 by the Chinese search giant Baidu. In late 2016, it was supplemented with a Melody chat-bot that supports various Chinese dialects. Since medical services in China are often paid, having the opportunity to consult the “virtual medic” for free is the reason of the application’s popularity.

Baidu Doctor allows you to contact the doctors on duty, order recipes and view information about the diseases. During the holidays in China, most doctors do not work while chat-bot is online 24/7. Melody chat-bot allows speeding up the process of consulting. Before transferring the request to a real doctor, the chat-bot asks the leading questions to patients in order to pin-point the possible problem as accurately as possible.

Due to a large number of dialects and huge popularity, developers use the ready-made databases to better the process of machine learning. According to the World Health Organization, in the next 20 years humanity will face a shortage of about 13 million doctors and medical workers. Therefore, the introduction of chat bots allows solving this problem in advance.

Source

Service and chat-bot MedWhat were designed to partially replace a personal physician. This is a mobile application with speech recognition. The chat-bot not only answers the frequently asked questions like “What to do if my throat hurts?” but also re-checks the patient’s state of health the day after the treatment.

In addition, it stores the user’s medical history and all the questions and symptoms are processed by the AI, which often predicts the diagnosis even before more troubling symptoms appear.

Source

Health bot is a product by Microsoft Corporation. It is based on Cortana speech recognition technologies. An important difference from other projects — the service is positioned as a platform for health organizations, including commercial ones, such as insurance companies.

So, insurance organizations using access to Health bot platform can provide their clients with a simple way to check a status of a claim and the ability to get the details about the insurance plans. Clinics and hospitals can create customized bots that classify the problems of patients by symptoms, aid them in seeking the right help and locate the nearest clinics, equipped with the needed facilities.

Currently a plethora of medical chat-bots are being developed by start-ups and large corporations alike. The already launched projects neither lack the funding, nor face the low efficiency problems. On the contrary, the successes of “virtual doctors” continue to amaze both real doctors and patients.

Virtually all aspects of IT technologies are now implemented in the medicine. And even if your business is not directly related to biotech or medical technology, think about it — the widespread introduction of chat-bots in medicine and other “traditionally human” spheres is a reality of a near future.

Appointments with doctors and, perhaps, personalized consultations, will soon become a premium service. Discussing the health or disease symptoms with a chat-bot will become the same norm as asking Siri for the weather forecast. Apple has Apple Health, Google — Google Fit, and Samsung has been developing its own Samsung Health for many years.

In turn, how can you use this trend yourself?

Start your own Chatbot Company with a White Label Version of BRAIN

Alex Galert CEO BRAIN (brn.ai)

Originally published at brn.ai on February 4, 2018.