Beyond Patient Monitoring: Conversational Agents Role in Telemedicine & Healthcare Support For Home-Living Elderly Individuals
This addresses the problem of providing scalable and cost-effective healthcare support for home-living elderly individuals, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing telemedicine and chatbot technologies.
The paper tackles the need for interactive systems to monitor and support elderly individuals at home, particularly after hospital discharge, by proposing the integration of chatbots into telemedicine systems to act as virtual assistants that bridge the gap between patients and clinicians.
There is a need for systems to dynamically interact with ageing populations to gather information, monitor health condition and provide support, especially after hospital discharge or at-home settings. Several smart devices have been delivered by digital health, bundled with telemedicine systems, smartphone and other digital services. While such solutions offer personalised data and suggestions, the real disruptive step comes from the interaction of new digital ecosystem, represented by chatbots. Chatbots will play a leading role by embodying the function of a virtual assistant and bridging the gap between patients and clinicians. Powered by AI and machine learning algorithms, chatbots are forecasted to save healthcare costs when used in place of a human or assist them as a preliminary step of helping to assess a condition and providing self-care recommendations. This paper describes integrating chatbots into telemedicine systems intended for elderly patient after their hospital discharge. The paper discusses possible ways to utilise chatbots to assist healthcare providers and support patients with their condition.