Validation of a Virtual Assistant for Improving Medication Adherence in Patients with Comorbid Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Depressive Disorder

Virtual assistants are programs that interact with users through text or voice messages simulating a human-based conversation. The development of healthcare virtual assistants that use messaging platforms is rapidly increasing. Still, there is a lack of validation of these assistants. In particular, this work aimed to validate the effectiveness of a healthcare virtual assistant, integrated within messaging platforms, with the aim of improving medication adherence in patients with comorbid type 2 diabetes mellitus and depressive disorder. For this purpose, a nine-month pilot study was designed and subsequently conducted. The virtual assistant reminds patients about their medication and provides healthcare professionals with the ability to monitor their patients. We analyzed the medication possession ratio (MPR), measured the level of glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and obtained the patient health questionnaire (PHQ-9) score in the patients before and after the study. We also conducted interviews with all participants. A total of thirteen patients and five nurses used and evaluated the proposed virtual assistant using the messaging platform Signal. Results showed that on average, the medication adherence improved. In the final interview, 69% of the patients agreed with the idea of continuing to use the virtual assistant after the study

Measurements, Medications, and Symptoms Logging Using a Virtual Assistant

This disclosure describes virtual assistant based techniques that, with user permission, log medications, symptoms, and measures of health. The techniques offer an easy mechanism for users to document their symptoms, vital signs, health data, etc. For example, a user simply speaks out their symptoms to their virtual assistant to create a log. Vital signs are automatically logged by the virtual assistant (with user permission) using, e.g., sensors and mobile/wearable devices. The techniques enable users to develop a personal health journal that frictionlessly logs activity, sleep, nutrition, heart rate, etc. When enabled, the virtual assistant reminds users of medications to be taken and also prevents accidental doubling of dosages. The automatically generated and curated personal health journal enables users to focus on a healthier lifestyle, provides valuable clues to pathologies, enables querying of health history, helps understand trends, and helps caregivers and doctors better deliver healthcare. The techniques are implemented with specific user permissions and in compliance with regulations related to health information

Virtual assistant service for patients and caregivers

A major healthcare cost is the lack of strict adherence to, or outright non-compliance with, medicines and medical schedule by patients. The techniques disclosed herein assist patients by automatically performing routine healthcare-related tasks, e.g., reminding patients to take medications at appropriate times; ordering prescription refills at pharmacies; scheduling and managing medical appointments; tracking and charting their vital statistics, e.g., blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate, etc.; asking for and logging patient symptoms, etc. The virtual personal assistant uses a machine learning model to adapt itself to the particulars of the patient. The virtual personal assistant may interface with the patient in one or more ways, e.g., using a voice-interface, a touchscreen-based graphical user interface, etc. Caregivers can advantageously use techniques described herein to better manage a patient’s health. In this manner, the patient enjoys a better quality of life and faces better health outcomes with reduced healthcare costs

Virtual roleplay assistant in healthcare

A presente dissertação de mestrado com o título “Assistente virtual de role-play em contexto de saúde” procurou dar resposta a um desafio colocado pela ESEP (Escola Superior de Enfermagem do Porto) visando a criação de uma aplicação tecnológica que ajudasse os professores a criar cenários clínicos para as aulas laboratoriais. Foi solicitado que os cenários deveriam incluir, para além de texto, aspetos gráficos capazes de ajudar o estudante a visualizar a situação problema de uma forma rápida e consistente. Do ponto de vista do professor, o processo de criação dos cenários deveria não consumir muito tempo, permitir a sua alteração para futuras utilizações. O novo formato digital dos cenários deveria ser acessível através do maior número de dispositivos tecnológicos. Através de uma pesquisa, foram apuradas potenciais soluções a problemas similares, assim como quais as tecnologias usadas. Estabelecida a necessidade e os requisitos da nova solução, procedeu-se a uma avaliação dos valores e mais-valias da nova solução. A conceção da solução tecnológica passou por uma análise detalhada de um conjunto de etapas de desenvolvimento: desde um processo de design iterativo, escolha de frameworks e desenvolvimento do código. A solução desenvolvida foi apresentada aos professores que a testaram e deram feedback positivo. Os professores realçaram o novo modelo como pedagogicamente útil, uma vez que os campos identificados nos cenários servirão de modelo de avaliação diagnóstica aos futuros profissionais em futuros contextos reais. Infelizmente, devido ao contexto da pandemia atual, não foi possível avaliar do ponto de vista do estudante. Apesar de se tratar de uma solução online, as práticas laboratoriais continuam dependentes do meio físico, pelo que a sua prática comprometeria o distanciamento social recomendado pelas organizações de saúde. Esta nova solução, no entanto, demonstrou dar resposta bem-sucedida a todos os requisitos funcionais inicialmente estabelecidos pelos professores, com base na auscultação dos estudantes.The following master's thesis, titled "Roleplay assistant in healthcare", has the core objective of answering a challenge, initially proposed by ESEP (Porto Nursing School), to implement a technological solution that would help the professors creating clinical scenarios to use in laboratory classes. The scenarios should go beyond written text, including graphical elements capable of helping the student retain and visualize a clinical situation quickly and efficiently. From the professor's standpoint, this tool should not be too time-consuming, and its content should be malleable for reusability. The tool should also provide a digital format, that should be accessible from almost any device. After initial research, similar potential solutions were evaluated as well as the adequate technologies to use. Having established the new solution's requirements, the benefits and value it would bring were analysed. The development was made in an iterative process, from design, framework selection and code development. The solution presented to the professors was tested and wielded positive feedback. They have emphasized the pedagogic value of the new design, as the identified fields in the scenarios will provide a model for nursing diagnostics in future and real professional contexts. Unfortunately, due to the current pandemic situation, it was not possible to evaluate the solution from the viewpoint of the students. Despite it being an online solution, the physical interaction of the laboratory classes is still paramount in order to access the students' performance, which would not be recommended due to the pandemic’s recommended social distancing. This new solution, however, seems to provide a positive response to all the established functional requirements from the professors based on the student's feedback

When Virtual Assistants Meet Teledermatology: Validation of a Virtual Assistant to Improve the Quality of Life of Psoriatic Patients

Teledermatology has given dermatologists a tool to track patients’ responses to therapy using images. Virtual assistants, the programs that interact with users through text or voice messages, could be used in teledermatology to enhance the interaction of the tool with the patients and healthcare professionals and the overall impact of the medication and quality of life of patients. As such, this work aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using a virtual assistant for teledermatology and its impact on the quality of life. We conducted surveys with the participants and measured the usability of the system with the System Usability Scale (SUS). A total of 34 participants (30 patients diagnosed with moderate-severe psoriasis and 4 healthcare professionals) were included in the study. The measurement of the improvement of quality of life was done by analyzing Psoriasis Quality of Life (PSOLIFE) and Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) questionnaires. The results showed that, on average, the quality of life improved (from 63.8 to 64.8 for PSOLIFE (with a p-value of 0.66 and an effect size of 0.06) and 4.4 to 2.8 for DLQI (with a p-value of 0.04 and an effect size of 0.31)). Patients also used the virtual assistant to do 52 medical consultations. Moreover, the usability is above average, with a SUS score of 70.1. As supported by MMAS-8 results, adherence also improved slightly. Our work demonstrates the improvement of the quality of life with the use of a virtual assistant in teledermatology, which could be attributed to the sense of security or peace of mind the patients get as they can contact their dermatologists directly within the virtual assistant-integrated system

Baccalaureate Occupational Therapy Assistant Education: Considerations from Other Healthcare Professions

The evidence for the benefits and challenges of an entry-level baccalaureate occupational therapy assistant education is lacking. Therefore, as many occupational therapy assistant programs consider transitioning from an associate degree level to a baccalaureate degree level, they must rely on considerations from other healthcare professions. This doctoral project reviews the evidence from nursing, dental hygiene and respiratory therapy. The aim of this project is to increase awareness of current literature on the potential benefits of an entry-level baccalaureate health care education and its implications for the occupational therapy education community. This knowledge was disseminated through three different knowledge translation methods. The first method was to educate occupational therapy practitioners, students and faculty via a Minnesota Occupational Therapy Association virtual continuing education event. The second method was to inform readers of the American Occupational Therapy Association’s Academic Education Special Interest Section Quarterly Newsletter through an article submitted for publication. The final method was to inform attendees of the American Occupational Therapy Association’s 2022 Education Summit through a professional presentation. Completion of these three knowledge translation projects provided a deeper understanding of an entry-level baccalaureate degree in three healthcare professions. This information may be translated to the potential benefits and challenges for the occupational therapy assistant degree. However, the need for continued research is needed as more baccalaureate occupational therapy assistant programs obtain accreditation and have graduates in the workforce. Future research should evaluate the outcomes of these graduates on both technical and clinical skills

An integrated framework to classify healthcare virtual communities

Healthcare (HC) strives to improve service quality through its cost-effective social computing strategy. However, sudden rise in the count of virtual community of practices (VCoPs) introduced many choices for physicians; As a result, it is not surprising to observe current literature reporting lack of study to investigate ideas integration within and between VCoPs. VCoPs need to be categorized for HC physicians so they will be able to pin-point effective a VC to attain assistance from. This paper is one of the first investigative studies, in HC sector, that proposed a framework to classify and pin-point appropriate VCoPs, for physicians, after it reviewed and analyzed traditional and up-to-date theoretical, empirical and case study literature in the area of social computing, knowledge management (KM) and VCoPs. The implementation of this framework pinpointed professional VCoPs as most appropriate for physicians based on strict requirements, i.e. closed physician communities holding many participants, which are older than 5 years with high boundary crossing. This framework is also a “one-size-fit-all” formula to build an organizational VCoP, utilizable by other business sectors

COVID-Net Assistant: A Deep Learning-Driven Virtual Assistant for COVID-19 Symptom Prediction and Recommendation

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put a significant burden on healthcare systems worldwide, there has been growing interest in finding inexpensive symptom pre-screening and recommendation methods to assist in efficiently using available medical resources such as PCR tests. In this study, we introduce the design of COVID-Net Assistant, an efficient virtual assistant designed to provide symptom prediction and recommendations for COVID-19 by analyzing users' cough recordings through deep convolutional neural networks. We explore a variety of highly customized, lightweight convolutional neural network architectures generated via machine-driven design exploration (which we refer to as COVID-Net Assistant neural networks) on the Covid19-Cough benchmark dataset. The Covid19-Cough dataset comprises 682 cough recordings from a COVID-19 positive cohort and 642 from a COVID-19 negative cohort. Among the 682 cough recordings labeled positive, 382 recordings were verified by PCR test. Our experimental results show promising, with the COVID-Net Assistant neural networks demonstrating robust predictive performance, achieving AUC scores of over 0.93, with the best score over 0.95 while being fast and efficient in inference. The COVID-Net Assistant models are made available in an open source manner through the COVID-Net open initiative and, while not a production-ready solution, we hope their availability acts as a good resource for clinical scientists, machine learning researchers, as well as citizen scientists to develop innovative solutions

Focal Spot, Spring 1999

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1081/thumbnail.jp

Addressing the Quality and Safety Gap Part II: How Nurses Are Shaping, and Being Shaped by, Health Information Technologies

Explores the role of health information technologies (HIT) in improving patient safety and the role of nurses in designing, implementing, and educating clinicians to use HIT, including electronic health records and bar code medication administration