From caring to preventing
A healthcare chatbot perspective
As part of our Master degree, we were asked to reflect on health-care chatbots and how we could improve them.
The health-care chatbots nowadays and in a near future
This kind of chatbot can be classified into two categories: physical and mental health.
In the physical health category, we have for instance bots that can give a basic diagnosis based on symptoms the user describes and decide if this user needs to go to a doctor or not. Similar bots were designed to help people act the right way in suspicion of Covid-19.
Mental health is also a trending domain as it takes more and more importance in this world we live in. It was shown that, for some people, it was easier to confess to a bot rather than a human that could judge them. This is also true for people with person-to-person communication issues like people with autism. Having a conversation with human can be a challenge for this population and the possibility to chat with a chatbot instead can greatly help them feel better.
The healthcare chatbots domain has grown a lot in the recent years and is called to developed even more in the future, as the demand tends to grow faster than the offer. It will probably be soon reality to follow a psychotherapy with a chatbot rather than a human for instance, or have your symptoms analysed by a chatbot to help you decide if you should consult a doctor or not.
Our chatbot
As we listed existing solutions, we realised something: healthcare chatbots are vastly about being sick and healing from this sickness. We therefore decided to tackle another aspect that seems to be little to not represented in the chatbots we could find: preventing rather than caring.
Based on this analysis, we designed “Mon Pote Santé” (My Health Buddy), a companion to help you deal with your daily hurts and bobbins (please appreciate the pun between “Pote” and “Bot”).
Mon Pote Santé has two sides: the caring and the preventing one.
On the caring side, it can give important phone numbers like the emergencies or poison control center for instance. The preventing side is about pollen allergies and sun sensitivity of the user. With the user’s location it is possible to inform them when there is a risk for them regarding pollen or UV.
Thus, you can ask “Do I need to put sun screening before going out?” or “Is there a risk regarding my allergies today?”, Mon Pote Santé knows you and can give you sound advice and help you avoid unnecessary harm.
We used the platform Deeplink to develop Mon Pote Santé and an API called Ambee to retrieve the data about UV and pollen as well as the geolocation API from the Swiss Confederation to translate addresses into coordinates.
Future work on Mon Pote Santé
As it is, Mon Pote Santé is just a proof-of-concept with the bare minimum functionalities, but we believe it has a real potential. We can expand its functionalities further by adding proactive scenarios, like automatic alerts in case of high pollen level or medicine reminders for people taking a daily treatment for instance. Another scenario that would be worth including is the monitoring of the air pollution and preventing the user from being exposed too severely to this pollution.
There are tons of similar scenarios that could be added (advice on injuries, how to properly disinfect a wound, symptoms tracking, etc.). Maybe Mon Pote Santé development will continue someday, time will tell.
Conclusion
Chatbots are a growing part of our world. We see them appearing on the website we browse, in the messaging apps we use, and soon healthcare chatbots will probably be part of our life too.
Health prevention is an important topic and it makes sense to include it in the health chatbots. Maybe in the future we will see more chatbots to include it in their functionalities, working at keeping us safe and sound in the first place rather than helping us to get better.
Thank you for reading this article, we hope you enjoyed it! We’d love to hear about your opinions and questions in the comments. If you found this article interesting please have a look to the Empathic Labs page for more stories.
