Institute For The Future

What if Your Doctor Prescribed a Chatbot for You?

 

A couple weeks ago during a research meeting for our upcoming year, our colleague Lyn Jeffery challenged us to imagine a future where, at some point in the next decade, doctors start prescribing chatbots, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence as a relatively routine matter of medical practice. It turns out there's good reason to think artificial intelligent bots - commonly called relational agents in the research literature - will be used in all sorts of medical applications--from treating mental health conditions to enhancing patient education.

 

For example, a recent (small) study from the Center for Connected Health found that in comparison to people trying to lose weight by tracking their activity levels, people who had access to their activity levels and an animated, virtual coach lost significantly more weight.

 

 

According to the study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, 70 overweight or obese participants were asked to wear a wireless pedometer and were given access to a website to review their step counts. Half of the group was given access to an automated, animated virtual coach via their home computer, where they received personalized feedback based on their step counts and were encouraged to set goals.

 

While everyone reported benefitting from taking part in the 12-week study, those using a virtual coach maintained their step counts, while those without access to a virtual coach saw their step counts decrease by 14.3 percent over the course of the study. In addition, 58.1 percent of the participants using a virtual coach indicated it motivated them to be more active, and 87.1 percent reported feeling guilty if they skipped an online appointment.

 

 

 

 

 

The added benefit of an relational agents hasn't just been observed in weight loss; virtual nurses have been successful in helping lower readmission rates and improving patient satisfaction, while a recent New York Times article noted mixed, though at least somewhat promising results for a variety of mental health apps that use designs rooted in cognitive bias modification to help people overcome social anxieties, as well as bad habits.

 

Not surprisingly, some of the leading proponents of virtual therapists point toward their basic cost effectiveness--particularly in light of rising health costs, an aging population, and future staffing shortages, the theory goes, relational agents will help fill all sorts of gaps in the health system, particularly anything that requires patients to change their own behaviors or to better understand their own conditions. Which is to say that in a few years, it seems likely that along with a prescription for a statin to lower cholesterol, you might very well get a little virtual reality avatar--in reality, a piece of programming code--that will remind you to exercise and let you know when you need to take your pills.