Intelligent Medical Care Assistant

Healthcare is a growing industry due to many factors including the rise in elderly population. However, in many cases patients may lack easy access to expert doctors. In addition, it is not an easy task, especially for elderly people, to search and access medical information available on the web. Smartphones can play an important role to provide several medical patients’ needs. There is an increased utilization of smartphones within the healthcare environment together with connected applications (apps). Many apps cover a wide spectrum of general medical knowledge and services. Such apps provide support for healthcare workers, including physicians, nurses, and assistants. However, there is a lack of apps that target patients to offer them smart and easy to access medical assistance. Keeping in view the main healthcare needs of patients, we are introducing “Intelligent Medical Care Assistant (IMCA)” a mobile based healthcare application which is integrated with cloud computing to provide smart medical care assistance that can be easily accessed by patients with focus on the elderly and the visually impaired patient’s requirements.

IMCA utilizes artificial intelligence, cloud, and smartphones technologies to provide help to a wide segment of patients, including the elderly and visually impaired people. Project stages included: First, analysis of the patients’ main requirement in a health related mobile application; Second, analysis of how the visually impaired use their smartphones and the difficulties they may face; Third, design and implementation of the IMCA mobile application with cloud integration. IMCA was designed to provide patients with a set of services including but not limited to:

Patients can store, edit, and share their medical history with a designated doctor.

Medication reminders can be added by the patient or automatically suggested by the system based on a current prescription.

The application offers a smart chat module offering smart health related assistance.

Patients can communicate with his doctor using the system live chat module.

Doctor can view their patient medical records (after patient approval).

Doctor can send or add a medical prescription for their patient in three different ways: as a voice prescription, as an image, or as a text.

Our hypothesis was that the utilization of smartphone apps as a frontend for artificial intelligence cloud services, such as Watson assistance, would offer patients efficient, swift, and easy access to trusted medical knowledge and expert doctors. The initial experimental results support our hypothesis by showing that the both doctors and patients find IMCA useful and that it provides services that are innovative and convenient. Further evaluation of IMCA is needed and is planned to be carried out in the final stage of the project.