A research company, Baidu Research, has recently launched their latest project last Tuesday. This project is an artificial intelligence chatbot that will assist patients – as well as doctors – by means of text messaging.
Baidu is aiming to make medical consultations easily accessible, while at the same time, assisting patients to determine if they need to see a doctor in person, or just receive a recommended solution.
An example would be informing Melody that you have a sick child; the AI would ask if your child has a fever, or is jaundiced. From there, it will ask another series of questions based upon your response.
Baidu already has an application on the market – Baidu Doctor. Melody will integrate with this app, providing further assistance for patients to directly ask doctors certain questions; making appointments as well as searching for medical information. Melody will ask the patients preliminary questions and then extract data from digitized textbooks, online forums and research papers to provide answers. With a variety of health care websites, this app is basically an AI-based web scrapper.
Essentially, after gathering all the patient’s information, Melody will diagnose the patent with a hypothesis that includes treatment options. After that, a human doctor will over-look and create any edits before sending them to the patient. Melody is also a self-learning bot that will constantly soak up knowledge and other information for future conversations with more potential patients.
A Baidu chief scientist, Andrew NG, states that this is merely the beginning of AI-driven healthcare practice.
For the bot to learn as it grows, it stores client information. However, the company states that the information is encrypted. Over the last decade or so, healthcare professionals have used computer-based technology to store important health issues, which is now becoming more useful.
While the mobile adoption of knowledge is vastly growing, telemedicine is also starting to play a vital role in our healthcare needs, more so when it comes to communities that don’t have direct access to physicians, or with those who have limited mobility.
Allegedly, there will also be a massive drop in human health care workers – estimated at nearly 13 million – by 2035.
Not all patients are comfortable talking to a computer. And more recently, Baidu was requested to change how their software utilizes search engine results. This occurred after a student recently died post visiting a health care provider that was at the top of the health care list. The regulators of the application have ruled that search results had not been properly labeled, and the application did favor those marketing over real health care professionals.
Sources: Research Baidu, Who (Health Workforce Shortage).
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