Virtual Assistant Prototype for Managing Medication Using Messaging Platforms

Abstract

Healthcare chatbots (a.k.a. virtual assistants) offer services, tools, and interactions to the users, providing advice, help, support, and management to different diseases. The users of this type of chatbots can be, for example, patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, with different needs and requirements. Sometimes, patients with chronic diseases needing to take different medications several times per day, can have difficulties to remember their medication intakes. This situation can lead to negative effects on treatment effectiveness. In this paper, we present a virtual assistant prototype, aimed to help and manage patient’s medication through the use of Signal, a secure messaging platform that uses end-to-end encryption for better user privacy. The objective of this work is to create a handy tool to remind medication intakes through the creation of a supportive community where patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals interact with helpful tools and services offered by the virtual assistant. Moreover, the developed prototype makes use of medical standards for data management and Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) for conversation support.