How Good is Artificial Intelligence at Automatically Answering Consumer Questions Related to Alzheimer's Disease?
This addresses the burden on family caregivers by potentially improving access to immediate answers in online communities, but it appears incremental as it applies existing AI/NLP methods to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of automatically answering Alzheimer's Disease-related consumer questions from caregivers using AI, and found that it is the first to apply and evaluate such models, though no concrete performance numbers are provided in the abstract.
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, comprising 60-80% of cases. There were an estimated 5.8 million Americans living with Alzheimer's dementia in 2019, and this number will almost double every 20 years. The total lifetime cost of care for someone with dementia is estimated to be $350,174 in 2018, 70% of which is associated with family-provided care. Most family caregivers face emotional, financial and physical difficulties. As a medium to relieve this burden, online communities in social media websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and Yahoo! Answers provide potential venues for caregivers to search relevant questions and answers, or post questions and seek answers from other members. However, there are often a limited number of relevant questions and responses to search from, and posted questions are rarely answered immediately. Due to recent advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), we propose to utilize AI to automatically generate answers to AD-related consumer questions posted by caregivers and evaluate how good AI is at answering those questions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the literature applying and evaluating AI models designed to automatically answer consumer questions related to AD.