Bliss
Bliss is an AI-powered text + voice based healthcare chatbot specially for the elderly population.
Design Goal
To let healthcare services more accessible to senior people
Target Audience
Senior people that are aged over 60
Main Features
Text + Voice Bot
Bliss is a hybrid chatbot that provides Text-to-Speech output and speech recognition in user input. It would be easier to learn and use by elderly than solely text-based chatbot platforms.
Healthcare Services
One place for going through the whole procedure in scheduling doctor's appointments. Bliss remembers and organizes your information, and provide friendly reminders to you. You can make arrangements on schedules or information anytime, anywhere.
Health and Wellness Advice
Bliss provides health and wellness advice in the form of “Quote of the day”. The friendly quotes allows you to be more familiar with helpful everyday health and wellness practices :)
Track Medical Status
After appointment, Bliss helps organize medical instructions from physicians and give reminders for taking medicines to you.
Accessibility
Emergency contact, call an ambulance and contact Bliss are 3 accessibility options provided in Bliss. It also confirm important information with you for one more time to prevent making mistakes.
Interactive Prototype
Click on Bliss logo to access the high fidelity chatbot prototype. Go through the prototype for more experience with different features of Chatbot Bliss.
Design Process
Problem
(1) Increasing elderly population and they are more likely to have serious health issues
(2) Barriers on accessing healthcare services (e.g. geographical distance, financial issues, socioeconomic status etc.)
(3) Senior population is under threat due to COVID-19, situations include high fatality rate, lack of essential care
Current Solutions
Babylon Health
Healthcare Chatbot:
- Make diagnosis by checking symptoms
- Video consultations with physicians
- Help with mental health concerns
- Record and update personal health conditions
Florence
Healthcare Chatbot:
- Reminders for taking medications
- Keep track of health status
- Search available healthcare services (e.g. pharmacies, clinics)
Babylon Health - https://www.babylonhealth.com/us
Florence - https://florence.chat/
Our New Solution
How to make the medium (chatbot) be easy to use for elderly?
Text-Only Chatbot
+
Voice + Text Chatbot
Elderly Friendly
Identify User Needs
A user study survey (n = 13) was conducted with target audiences which are seniors over age of 65. It contains questions on asking participants’ opinions on chatbots and views on how healthcare services can be improved by integrating a chatbot. We aim to take potential users’ thoughts into development of chatbot that can better suit users’ needs.
Survey
We created questions to ask about the technology literacy and preference in healthcare in the survey.
Have you ever used chatbots before?
When using smart devices to communicate with others, would you prefer voice-based or text-based platform?
Things in healthcare services participants feel troublesome to do (TOP 3)
- Find suitable healthcare services
- Schedule appointments
- Remember taking medications
Preferred features in healthcare chatbot (TOP 3)
- Provide help in problems with sensitive topics
- Reminder in taking medications
- Procedure in healthcare service (check symptoms, schedule appointments, access test results)
Survey results findings:
- Not many people have used chatbots before ➔ develop a chatbot easy to learn and use by people
- Some people prefer text-based devices, others prefer voice-based devices ➔ text + voice based device to satisfy a wider range of users’ needs
Chatbot Development
The chatbot developed is a voice + text hybrid model, and it is AI-powered.
The 2 following features are incorporated into the chatbot:
Speech Recognition
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Bliss Chatbot Workflow
User input will be sorted into 2 categories:
1. Inputs that can match data in the system
System decides the responses carried out for each input until goal achieved.
2. Inputs that system cannot match to its data
Live human agents will help respond and solve the problem.
Discussion
Motivations in using healthcare chatbot
Easy access to healthcare services
- Less traveling and waiting for making appointments
- Find help easily in emergency situations
Safe to use
- Professional help available 24x7 as online consultant
- Prevent wrong self-diagnosis
User interaction
Positives
- Simple interface design
- Predefined quick response make conversation easier
- Voice message option is helpful in conversation
Concerns
- Elderly speaks differently than younger people
- React to correct mistakes slower
- Lower acceptability to technology and new information
- Not able to care for human's emotions
Future Improvements
- Provide personalized health and wellness advice according to users' health conditions
- Adjust chatbot response time to allow corrections on mistakes
- Create methods to increase acceptability of the chatbot system to elderly
- Further NLP development to understand wider range of user input and provide relevant responses
- Make chatbot be more sensitive to human's emotions
- Connect chatbot to wearable sensors to closely monitor user's health status
Project Information:
Overview: Healthcare Chatbot, Elderly
Year: 2020
My Contribution: literature review, user research, prototyping, discussion, furture improvements
Type: UX Design
Group Project
Teammate: Tooba Imtiyaz