Alice Wen Lin

Summary

The coronavirus Pandemic 2019 outbreak has made it obligatory for all healthcare providers to adapt to changing health circumstances. Disease control centers have encouraged hospitals and healthcare providers to search for innovative ways to switch to online modes for providing proper healthcare. Because of the rapidly spreading Corona Virus, people are bound to their homes. In this manner, chatbots have proven to be a blessing in disguise that can assist in screening processes of the patient in a scalable manner. This project is about creating and implementing a chatbot that would help patients worldwide with questions about the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Patients will ask their queries regarding the symptoms of corona and get help from the chatbot using voice input and voice output. The creation of chatbots will be based on "Natural Language Processing (NLP)"" and "Artificial Intelligence (AI)"". This chatbot can be deployed at various healthcare facilities. The chatbot would also be beneficial for those who have a speech disability.

Motivation

The coronavirus pandemic can be considered as the accelerator and motivation behind creating and implementing chatbots, having the ability to help people globally to ask their queries while being at home in their safety and comfort zone following the Covid-19 SOPs as well as social distancing. Keeping in view the benefits of these chatbots beyond pandemic in the healthcare sector, the adoption of such a developed form of chatbots will continue to grow in the future. Patients, especially from far-off places, would not have to travel a long distance just for a simple checkup that eventually not only saves their time but their money also. Besides this, there are a lot of other people who are not capable of speaking or even hearing. They find it difficult to explain their health problems to the doctors. This whole thought process motivated me to design an "automatic speech recognition (ASR)"" and "Text to speech (TTS)"" based chatbot that would help not only other users but also those who have some kind of speech or hearing disability, so that, maximum people can benefit from this technology [1].

Project Description

Chatbot Feature

A chatbot makes an interaction with the human through instant messaging, artificially imitating the human interaction pattern. Artificial intelligence-based algorithms make computers acquire knowledge on their own without programming. Chatbots develop the ability to comprehend the natural language (text or speech). Therefore, a chatbot is some sort of AI-based computer program that pretends to be a human to initiate the conversation with actual humans. Primarily, it allows starting a conversation between machine and human using Text-to-speech or Speech-to-text messages.

One of the important and significant features of the chatbot is that it works independently without human intervention and provides answers to the queries using a combination of already defined scripts and natural language processing [2].

Chatbots can store all the information to be used in the future. They are built on networking algorithms or AI-based machine learning (ML) techniques to get to the right conclusion. Besides memorizing the provided user’s data, chatbots possess the feature to adjust their language as well as the voice tones on the basis of the content of the discussion personalization, and advanced user experience. A fully designed chatbot having progressive features is capable of providing solutions and suggestions about every type of healthcare issue based on past interactions.

In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, chatbots provide strong potential for thought fully organized information in the healthcare sectors. The curated information is personalized as per the needs and symptoms of each patient. The chatbots can respond to particular questions in a highly interactive manner, more quickly than the conventional online searching methods [3].

The adoption of chatbots for providing information regarding Covid-19 can overcome the burden of reception of hospitals. The coherent feature of a chatbot for checking corona symptoms will reduce the rapidly increasing cases in emergency wards and units.

Open Source Chatbot Tools for Covid-19

To tackle the Covid-19 pandemic, several organizations have generated a list of open-source chatbot software tools that can be used to build recovery plans [4].

• Covid-19 Health Bot: It gathers autonomous screening protocols from organizations.
• Maladie Coronavirus: A chatbot-based open-source questionnaire comprising of 23 questions about symptoms, history, physical attributes, etc.

Skills Required to Build Chatbot

To build a chatbot for the healthcare sector, the software developer must have an in-depth understanding of several programming languages as well as recent technologies. Some of the essential skills that a chatbot developer requires to have are as follows [5]:

• Frameworks for chatbot development: The developer must be proficient in using anyone of the following frameworks to build chatbots from the scratch: “Microsoft Azure Bot Service”, API.ie, “IBM Watson”, etc.
• Technological Skills: Developers must be fully familiarized with the use of Artificial intelligence (AI), “Natural language Processing” and machine learning techniques.
• Programming languages: Chatbot developers are highly recommended to have in-depth knowledge about various programming languages. These programming languages can be Java,PHP, Python, Ruby.
• Mobile messaging App: Chatbot/ software developers must be acquainted with distinct platforms to incorporate chatbots. The example of such platforms is WhatsApp chatbots, Skype, Facebook messenger, etc.

Project Outcome

The project of implementing a FAQ-based AI-driven chatbot will have a positive outcome in various sectors but in the healthcare industry, it will prove to be a blessing in disguise in this time of pandemic when following SOPs and keeping social distancing is very essential for safety, particularly for elderly people. The beneficial outcome of a chatbot is as follows:

• With AI-powered chatbots for the Covid-19 pandemic, patients can attain better solutions for their corona symptoms.
• Other than providing help for coronavirus queries, the implementation of chatbots in the health sector can streamline several administrative tasks by overcoming their burden.
• The implementation of a chatbot will make users get a quick response along with a better solution without waiting for a long duration in a queue. The patient would not have to take a week-long doctor appointment for check-ups.

Figure 1. Benefits of Chatbot in Healthcare [6]

References

1. J. Espinoza, K. Crown, and O. Kulkarni, "A Guide to Chatbots for COVID-19 Screening at Pediatric Health Care Facilities,"" JMIR Public Health Surveill., vol. 6, no. 2, Jun. 2020, DOI: 10.2196/18808.
2. R. Pryss et al., "Using Chatbots to Support Medical and Psychological Treatment Procedures: Challenges, Opportunities, Technologies, Reference Architecture,"" in Digital Phenotyping and Mobile Sensing, H. Baumeister and C. Montag, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp. 249–260.
3. "Chatbots provide millions with COVID-19 information every day, but they can be improved - here’s how,"" World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/chatbots-covid-19-governance-improved-here-s-how/ (accessed Mar. 21, 2021).
4. "Building and Reusing Open Source Tools for Government,"" New America. http://newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiative/reports/building-and-reusing-open-source-tools-government/ (accessed Mar. 21, 2021).
5. "Chatbot Developers, Top Qualities and Skills,"" Full Scale, Jul. 08, 2020. https://fullscale.io/blog/chatbot-developers-top-qualities-and-skills/ (accessed Mar. 21, 2021).
6. "Advantages of Chatbots in Healthcare Industry [Healthcare Chatbot Benefits],"" Appy Pie, Sep. 13, 2020. https://www.appypie.com/healthcare-chatbot-advantages (accessed Mar. 21, 2021).