HealthBots

Recent studies have highlighted that more than 70% of patients and their caregivers experience anxiety prior to undergoing an invasive treatment. Additionally, over 80% of them require timely, trustworthy, detailed, and accurate information about their treatment. The provision of such information holds the potential to alleviate pre- and post-operative anxiety.

To address this issue, we designed and developed chatbots, powered by state-of-the-art generative AI models fine-tuned on the doctor’s provided knowledge base. These HealthBots aims to assist patients and their caregivers in obtaining answers to their queries regarding pre- and post-treatment. Throughout this process, doctors and patient coordinators need to actively participate, offering feedback on the bot’s generated answers to improve the quality of responses over time. The bots are designed to be multimodal, supporting both voice and text interactions, and it is also multilingual.

Right now, we are working on developing and evaluating chatbots for patients undergoing Cataract surgeries (CataractBot, in collaboration with the Sankara Eye Hospital) and patients undergoing Cancer treatment (OncoBot).

Apart from that, we are also exploring the usage of generative AI in training community health workers and nurses (in collaboration with local NGOs), and in supporting pre-consultation to help information exchange between healthcare providers and patients (in collaboration with the University of Toronto).