Impressive for a Robot: Home Care AI Assistants Included in AI Tools Being Embraced by Australia's Health System

A senior citizen grew accustomed to getting Aida's regular call at 10am.

A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant wasn't initially included in the service the participant envisioned when she enrolled for the in-home support but when she was invited to be part of the pilot program several months back, the 79-year-old said yes because she wished to contribute. Even though, truth be told, her hopes weren't high.

Even so, when she got the call, she states: “I was so overtaken by how responsive the AI was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“The AI would then pose questions – ‘have you had a chance to step outside today?’”

Aida would also inquire about what the user had planned for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“If I would say I plan to go shopping, she’d say are you shopping for clothes or groceries? I found it entertaining.”

Bots Easing the Workload on Medical Staff

The trial, which has now wrapped up its first phase, is one of the ways in which progress in artificial intelligence are being integrated in healthcare.

Health tech firm Healthily approached the care organization regarding the program to utilize its advanced AI system to provide social interaction, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to log any health issues or concerns for a staff member to address.

A senior director, national director of the home care division, says the AI check-in being trialled is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Clients still receive a weekly personal visit, but between these meetings … the [AI] system enables a daily check-in, which can then escalate any potential concerns to either our team or a client’s family,” Jones notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of the company, reports there have been no any adverse incidents reported from the pilot program.

The company uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the conversation is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to critical medical problems quickly, Campbell says. As an instance, if a client is reporting chest pains, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the conversation terminated so the person could dial triple zero.

Campbell thinks AI has an important role given staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“The benefit very safely, with technology like this, is reduce the administrative load on the workforce so trained clinicians can concentrate on doing the job that they’re trained to do,” she comments.

AI Not as New as You Might Think

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, explains older forms of artificial intelligence have been a common feature of medicine for a long time, often in “back office services” such as interpreting medical images, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Any computer program that performs a task that requires judgment in some way is AI, irrespective of how it accomplishes it,” says the professor, who is additionally the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“If you go the radiology unit, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you will find programs in equipment performing these tasks.”

Over the past decade, newer forms of AI called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that enables systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been used to interpret medical imaging and improve diagnosis, Coiera says.

In November, BreastScreen NSW became the nation's pioneering population-based screening program to introduce machine reading technology to support radiologists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

They are specialized tools that still require a qualified physician to interpret the diagnosis they might suggest, and the responsibility for a medical decision rests with the medical practitioner, Coiera emphasizes.

The Function of AI in Identifying Illness Early

A research center in Melbourne has been collaborating with researchers from a UK university who first developed AI methods to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities called focal cortical dysplasias from brain scans.

These lesions trigger seizures that crequently are resistant with medication, meaning surgery to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. But, the surgery can proceed if the doctors can locate the affected area.

A study recently released in the scientific publication, a group from the research body, led by neurologist the lead researcher, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could detect the lesions in up to 94% of instances from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have historically been missed in the majority of patients (60%).

The system was trained on the images of a group of individuals and then tested on pediatric cases and 12 adults. Of the 17 children, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology employs neural network classifiers comparable with the mammography analysis – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “speeding up the process to get to the answers,” the researcher says.

She emphasises the researchers are still in the “early phases” of the work, with a further study required to advance the tool toward clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the research, says modern imaging now generate such vast quantities of detailed information that it is challenging for a person to review it thoroughly. Thus for clinicians the challenge of locating these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how AI can support doctors in making quicker, precise identifications, and has the ability to enhance surgical access and results for kids with treatment-resistant seizures,” the professor says.

Illness Identification in the Years Ahead

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, explains deep neural networks are also helping to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the national health summit in Wollongong, cited Blue Dot, a organization set up by medical experts and which was one of the first organisations to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the technology can produce original material using existing information. These uses in healthcare encompass tools such as the virtual assistant as well as the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been adopting digital assistants, which records the consultation and turns into a consultation note that can be included in the health file.

Wright says the main benefit of the tools is that it enhances the quality of the communication between the physician and individual.

A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that scribes are helping physicians optimise their time and adds artificial intelligence also has the potential to prevent repeated examinations and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization