When book­ing a train tick­et, or con­tact­ing an after sales ser­vice, we have all already expe­ri­enced ‘exchang­ing’ with con­ver­sa­tion­al robots, the so-called ‘chat­bots*’, which are increas­ing present on Face­book as well as on on-line sales out­lets. Olivi­er Thuil­lart, who grad­u­at­ed from UTC in 2008, major­ing in Bio-engi­neer­ing, thought that chat­bots could prove to be very use­ful in the health care domain… pro­vid­ed we have a per­fect mas­tery of the safe­ty con­straints that apply to health-relat­ed data. 

“What we observe today is a need to opti­mize time absorbed in med­ical activ­i­ties: there are less and less anes­thetists, less doc­tors and more and more patients at home with a com­pli­cat­ed care pro­to­col and exten­sive med­ical equip­ment” notes Olivier. 

“Now we may ask: what if con­ver­sa­tion­al robots could assist both patients and prac­ti­tion­ers? It was on the basis of this thought that I cofound­ed Bot­de­sign in 2017, with my asso­ciate”. The strong point of these two asso­ciates relies on their excel­lent knowl­edge of health ques­tions, which has enabled them to pro­pose tools for the pro­fes­sion­als and prac­ti­tion­ers, com­pli­ant with cur­rent French leg­is­la­tion. The poten­tial for con­ver­sa­tion­al robots, in data analy­sis, in clin­i­cal stud­ies, in patient mon­i­tor­ing … is very wide and rich. “We know, for exam­ple, that cer­tain patents stop their treat­ment as soon as they get home. A chat­bot can remind a patient of this and check if the med­i­c­i­nal drugs are being tak­en cor­rect­ly, or even inform oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers or the fam­i­ly doc­tor, if some­thing seri­ous is detect­ed, pro­vid­ed the patents them­selves are equipped with appro­pri­ate ‘con­nect­ed’ devices”, adds Olivier. 

The first con­ver­sa­tion­al robot – for the Nat­u­rac­tive** line of prod­ucts pro­duced by the Pierre Fab­re Lab­o­ra­to­ries, has been on line since Feb­ru­ary 2018. “We also work with French hos­pi­tals, assem­bling and pro­gram­ming a chat­bot for pre-anes­the­sia obstet­rics. The robot will ask all the stan­dard ques­tions (first child? weight …) and will trans­mit the answers to the anes­thetist who will con­se­quent­ly be able to focus on par­tic­u­lar med­ical and human points with the patent in the pre-op ren­dezvous. We are also work­ing a lot with patient asso­ci­a­tions, for exam­ple with the French Asso­ci­a­tion for Dia­bet­ics, to come up with a chat­bot that can help dia­betes patients to look after them­selves bet­ter and also to answer their questions”. 

After the field com­mis­sion­ing of these ear­ly chat­bot mod­els, the asso­ciates intend in the near future to do some fund-rais­ing to con­sol­i­date the tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments and to improve the real-time mes­sage sys­tem INFINITY, which allows med­ical work­ers to com­mu­ni­cate live, real time and in total con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. “We are also work­ing man-machine Inter­ca­tions,“ adds Olivi­er, “on voice inte­gra­tion, on 3D avatars that will allow oper­a­tors to enjoy a more gam­ing exchange with the robots, notably when chil­dren are involved. We also plan to devel­op French and Span­ish lan­guage chat­bot ver­sions, for the Euro­pean mar­ket and beyond the EU, the glob­al markets”.  ** https://www.facebook.com/Naturactive/