Chatbot for digital healthcare: virtual psychologists of users who understand their emotions
In digital healthcare, chatbots are one of the most recent digital tools. In this article, we talk about chatbots programmed with psychological interpretation functions.
The example of the Tess chatbot
There are several chatbots created with the aim of monitoring patients’ mental health. One of the first chatbots to come to life was Eliza, who used active listening to work.
X2 has developed the Tess chatbot, which is capable of recognizing emotional states starting from user actions such as typing words, the presence of grammatical errors, the patterns of sentences used. Tess is successfully employed with Syrian refugees and offers her availability at all hours of the day, offering the possibility of her use in different languages and representing for users a sort of online psychologist able to monitor the status of the user and to pay attention that this does not need the intervention of a “physical” professional.
This chatbot carries out its activity on different channels, such as text messages, the most popular browsers, and Facebook Messenger, thus allowing its use both through the internet and in its absence.
The chatbots change according to the language the users use: there is Emma, the Dutch version, which deals with monitoring fear and anxiety; then there is Nema, the English one, which works in the field of childhood focusing on diabetes.
Babylon: Digital healthcare subscription
Babylon is a digital healthcare subscription operator of English origin, which allows users to consult doctors and other professional figures via live chat or live video. It offers the possibility of requesting appointments and recipes, rather than paying visits.
Baidu Doctor
Baidu Doctor is a Chinese application created in 2015 to which a year later a Melody chatbot was added, which recognizes and uses the different Chinese dialects. The popularity of Baidu Doctor is due to the fact that it offers the possibility of free consultations with doctors, who in China are mostly paid.
Even Baidu Doctor, like Babylon, has among its functions those of requesting medical prescriptions and obtaining information relating to one’s health 24 hours a day.
According to the WHO, in the near future, there will be a significant drop in the number of doctors in the world: the presence of chatbots of this type would contribute to reducing the impact that the drop could cause.
Microsoft and the Health Bot tool
Microsoft’s Health Bot tool uses Cortana for speech recognition. The Health Bot platform is used in particular by insurance companies that allow customers to verify the damage situation and the possibility of requesting insurance through the platform.
Chatbots can be programmed to meet every purpose: they can be used to advise patients the closest facility to go in case of a health problem or to evaluate and classify diseases based on symptoms.
The possibilities are endless: we can be sure that chatbots are here to stay.
