AI-powered bot to help medical professional monitor patients with Covid-19

In Singapore, the National University Health System and Bot MD, an AI healthcare startup, have developed SGDormBot – an AI-powered chatbot that allows physicians to monitor the health of residents at six dormitories for migrant workers.

The dormitories house more than 1000 people and, due to the lack of isolations facilities, migrant workers continue to stay at the dormitories even after having been diagnosed with Covid-19. Because these patients need continual monitoring and the dormitories don’t have medical personnel available for most pf the day, the chatbot allows physicians to remotely monitor these patients in real-time.

“There was limited healthcare manpower deployed to the dormitories. All of them are volunteers and they are usually only available during office hours. Therefore, it is challenging to monitor the patients during the acute phase of their illness if their condition deteriorated. We wanted to build a clinical tool that would enable remote monitoring of these patients by volunteer doctors, and one which would be intuitive and widely accessible so that patients could self-report their vitals without needing too much additional training”, explained Dr. Stephanie Ko, one of the doctors caring for the residents in the dormitories and who helped develop the bot.

Through a WhatsApp business account, the bot reminds the residents twice a day to measure their temperature, heart rate and oxygen levels and report them through the chat. To overcome language barriers, the chatbot communicates with each resident in their native language. The patients log their data into the chatbot, which is able to identify any abnormality that suggest the patient’s condition is worsening. In that case,the SGDormBot sends an alert to the NUHS clinicians, who is then able to intervene right away through a videoconference consultation and direct the patient for a hospital visit if necessary.

The chatbot has been put to use in the six dormitories and has been very well received by both the residents and the clinical team. The bt has recorded over 90% compliance from the residents, who are very consisting in sending their two health reports every day. And the team hoped. That the project can be extended beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. “For the long term, we hope that this can be developed into a scalable telemedicine solution for remote monitoring of chronic diseases, and we are building our monitoring dashboard with this long-term view in mind”, explained Dr. Jen Wei Ying who, together with Dr.Ko, were the ones that approached the BotMD startup to develop the bot.

Adapted from: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/new-chatbot-helps-doctors-monitor-...
https://kr-asia.com/bot-md-empowers-doctors-with-ai-clinical-assistants-...