Medbot: Conversational Artificial Intelligence Powered Chatbot for Delivering Tele-Health after COVID-19

Abstract

Telemedicine can be used by medical practitioners to connect with their patients during the recent Coronavirus outbreak, whilst attempting to reduce COVID-19 transmission among patients and clinicians. Amidst the pandemic, Telemedicine has the potential to help by permitting patients to receive supportive care without having to physically visit a hospital by using a conversational artificial intelligence-based application for their treatment. Thus, telehealth will rapidly and radically transform in-person care to remote consultation of patients. Because of this, it developed a Multilingual Conversational Bot based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide free primary healthcare education, information, advice to chronic patients. The study introduces a novel computer application acting as a personal virtual doctor that has been opportunely designed and extensively trained to interact with patients like human beings. This application is based upon a serverless architecture and it aggregates the services of a doctor by providing preventive measures, homeremedies, interactive counseling sessions, healthcare tips, and symptoms covering the most prevalent diseases in rural India. The paper proposes a conversational bot "Aapka Chikitsak" on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for delivering telehealth in India to increase the patient's access to healthcare knowledge and leverage the potentials of artificial intelligence to bridge the gap of demand and supply of human healthcare providers. This conversational application has resulted in reducing the barriers for access to healthcare facilities and procures intelligent consultations remotely to allow timely care and quality treatment, there by effectively assisting the society.