Pre-Consulting Dialogue Systems for Telemedicine
Tittaya Mairittha, Tsuyoshi Okita, Sozo Inoue · 2018
Telemedicine is an emerging challenge for the shortage of qualified professionals, particularly in under-resourced regions. Physical assessment by a non-medical doctor is a practice in telemedicine which discovers essential symptom of a patient who needs to consult a doctor. We aim at facilitating this stage with a conversational chatbot which identifies the patient by conversation. Adopting the procedures of physical assessment one critical types of conversation involves in the self-diagnosis. Further, it turned out that useful kinds of questions in chatbot at this stage are related to Yes/No questions. We discovered that particular difficulties lie in the ambiguous replies by the patients: a patient modifies a question which makes them answer yes or no, a response does not the corresponding reply to the question, a reply involves some part yes and some part no, and so on. Focusing on this particular type of question we introduce a text classifier using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and build a corpus using Twitter.