China’s Baidu has developed a bot that uses natural language processing to interact directly with patients, supporting doctors by speeding up the process of diagnosing.
The medical profession is under increasing pressure. A global shortfall in health-care workers will reach 12.9 million by 2035, according to the World Health Organization. And, in China, the shortage of health-care professionals is even more acute. In response to this, Chinese search engine Baidu launched a medical chatbot named Melody, designed to speed up the process of diagnosing patients.
Melody was created for Baidu’s Doctor mobile app. It uses advanced deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies developed by Baidu, to support doctors by speeding up the process of diagnosis and offering treatment options.
The bot works by gathering information from patients in real time through questioning and comparing their responses with Baidu’s database of medical information. Wei Fan, senior director in Baidu’s Big Data Lab, said, ‘With Melody, our goal is to provide patients with an online experience that is close to a human conversation. We believe this natural type of interaction will help patients feel more comfortable with their doctors and result in a more beneficial patient–doctor relationship.’ The bot gives highly customized and situation-appropriate responses to a patient’s query. As Melody has more conversations, it will also learn and keep getting better. Its developers hope this is just the start of a much larger, AI-driven transformation of the health-care industry.
The new AI-based medical assistant functionality will increase doctor productivity and enable patients to obtain faster responses to their health-related questions.
Baidu has built a 1,000-person team to work on AI – one of the company’s top priorities. The app launches in China along with partners including doctors and health-care organizations. The company is also in talks with health-care organizations in the United States and Europe. Baidu drew on data from a number of public and private sources for Melody’s artificial intelligence, including medical textbooks, medical websites and search queries and information supplied by doctors. It then applied deep learning to all that health data in order to make sense of it.
Melody is not ready to make diagnoses directly to patients. This type of technology is a long way from replacing human physicians with fully robotic doctors. The company is focused on helping to bridge the gap between patients and doctors and relieve some of the pressure, rather than replacing health-care professionals altogether.
China has already deployed chatbots in an array of roles, so Chinese consumers are already quite comfortable about chatting to AI-powered bots. However, it is hard to ignore the high-profile health-care data breaches that have taken place in recent years. In light of this, some consumers are likely to be wary of sharing too much health information with Melody and Baidu, and risk exposing their medical records to malicious parties.
We have seen some significant medical innovations that use technology to support the process of diagnosis, including a start-up called Everly that allows patients to order medical tests at home and view the results online, and a wearable chip developed at Eindhoven University that monitors sweat levels to detect whether users are ill.
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Website: www.research.baidu.com/baidus-melody-ai-powered-conversational-bot-doctors-patients/
Contact: https://twitter.com/baiduresearch
Company name: Baidu
Innovation name: Melody
Country: China
Industry: Health & wellbeing