Demo Alleviate: Demonstrating Artificial Intelligence Enabled Virtual Assistance for Telehealth: The Mental Health Case

After the pandemic, artificial intelligence (AI) powered support for mental health care has become increasingly important. The breadth and complexity of significant challenges required to provide adequate care involve: (a) Personalized patient understanding, (b) Safety-constrained and medically validated chatbot patient interactions, and (c) Support for continued feedback-based refinements in design using chatbot-patient interactions. We propose Alleviate, a chatbot designed to assist patients suffering from mental health challenges with personalized care and assist clinicians with understanding their patients better. Alleviate draws from an array of publicly available clinically valid mental-health texts and databases, allowing Alleviate to make medically sound and informed decisions. In addition, Alleviate's modular design and explainable decision-making lends itself to robust and continued feedback-based refinements to its design. In this paper, we explain the different modules of Alleviate and submit a short video demonstrating Alleviate's capabilities to help patients and clinicians understand each other better to facilitate optimal care strategies.

NLP is Not enough -- Contextualization of User Input in Chatbots

AI chatbots have made vast strides in technology improvement in recent years and are already operational in many industries. Advanced Natural Language Processing techniques, based on deep networks, efficiently process user requests to carry out their functions. As chatbots gain traction, their applicability in healthcare is an attractive proposition due to the reduced economic and people costs of an overburdened system. However, healthcare bots require safe and medically accurate information capture, which deep networks aren't yet capable of due to user text and speech variations. Knowledge in symbolic structures is more suited for accurate reasoning but cannot handle natural language processing directly. Thus, in this paper, we study the effects of combining knowledge and neural representations on chatbot safety, accuracy, and understanding.