Top Useful Chatbots for Health
Medical chatbots offer advice, responsibly.
Healthcare is essential for a good life. Unfortunately, consultation with a doctor can be difficult to obtain, especially if we need advice on non-life threatening problems. The healthcare system is congested and inefficient, and sick people may wait weeks or months for a visit.
In some areas of the world, the basic rules for a healthy life are unknown because of the poor medical information, taboos, or lack of interest from people. It’s impossible to fix these problems with a bot, but a bot can certainly help to make the situation better.
The first “operative” bot in the healthcare sphere dates back to 50 years ago. ELIZA was created to mimic a Rogerian psychologist, that is a therapist who asks questions to the patient simply by rearranging what the patient himself said. Intelligent conversation is only emulated, allowing the chatbot to have some success in those days, when AI was just something seen in the sci-fi novels.
To be amazing today, we need something more advanced. Some chatbots are compact medical reference books, which are useful for patients and for those who want to learn more about health.
Bots like HealthTap or Your.Md are miniature doctors who help people find a solution to the most common symptoms through AI. Don’t confuse these self-diagnosis tools with real doctors. A chatbot never replaces an experienced doctor. The bot itself exhorts the user to book an appointment with a doctor for a diagnosis, and eventually for the prescription of a therapy.
The real benefit of these chatbots is the ability to provide advice and informations for an healthy life because some groups of people don’t have a good basic knowledge of health. Some people live for years with debilitating but ignored symptoms simply because they think they don’t need a doctor. Many young boys and girls have no sex education and no awareness about sexually transmitted diseases, because it’s a taboo in family, at school and in the community.
Most of the population doesn’t know the correct use of OTC drugs and antibiotics which leads to abusing medicines they do not need or making the therapy ineffective. All these problems are easily solved thanks to the internet and the opportunity to access to medical resources for free.
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Chatbots like Your.Md help people to understand symptoms and consider them as clear signs from our body, hoping that the user is persuaded to talk to a doctor, or at least to avoid unhealthy habits.
In case of therapy, another useful chatbot has been created for us: Florence is a “personal nurse,” and “she” can remind us to take our pills. We just write the name of the medicine in chat, the number of times a day we must take it and at what time. Then, Florence send us a message in chat everytime we must take the pill.
Even in healthcare, bots can improve and facilitate the lives of many people, making it easier to access to the informations needed.
What will be the next news? Can we hope for a significant improvement of the “culture of health” thanks to chatbot? Will they be the intelligent doctors assistants of the future?
Originally posted on TalKing.
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