How Artificial Intelligence Avatars are Changing Health Behavior Modification

During my nearly 40 years as a physician I have watched the advent of an amazing amount of technology that has literally changed medicine. Many of these innovations are so commonplace now that we forget that they are actually relatively new.

In the early 1970’s we had no MRI scanner, the PET scan was a dream and only a few hospitals in the US had a CT scanner. The first ultrasound photos of children in the womb were so unclear that it was impossible to tell the sex of the child. The coronary catheter had not been developed, we used EKGs and central lines to predict when and if you would die, obviously we had no stints and there were no artificial heart valves.

Biotech drugs came from pigs, cows and horses… in the form of horse serum for snakebites, and we took beef and pork pancreas’ to create a mixed form of insulin.

All of this has now changed.

Now we can find the genotype and even the epigenetic traits of a tumor and are diagnosing and treating diseases in ways that even science fiction movies had not envisioned. We have treatments that would have been considered miracles just a few decades ago. However, Americans are less healthy now than during World War II and our most common causes of death are due to of our own destructive behaviors.

Medical technology has yet to conquer health behavior modification. Don’t get me wrong; we know how to modify health behavior. It basically takes a coach or mentor or health care provider who can assist in determining the adverse behavior, helping the patient acquire motivation to change, breakdown the issues into bite size pieces and create triggers to the new behavior. The coach can deal with the readiness to change, provide education and rewards and social interaction and games. These are all of the things that we know work. 

We have over 80 theories and models of how to change health behavior and the coach can use every one of them; however, this coaching requires an enormous amount of manpower and is very expensive.

But new technologies have arisen that may enable the wide deployment of personalized health behavior coaching. The technologies are artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding (NLU), also called natural language processing.

Companies working in this space include iDAvatars, MedRespond and Next IT Healthcare. All three of these companies are looking to change medicine in their own way by using a combination of intelligence and conversational interface to literally talk to people.  In this way, they are attempting to help people with various aspects of medical care using text-based conversations.

MedRespond, located in Pittsburgh, allows patients to ask a variety of questions about a specific issue.  The NLU engine then triggers a video of a person (typically a physician) who answers the question.  They have deployed several of these avatars to assist people with end of life, upcoming surgical procedures, and even oncology care.

iDAvatars, headquartered in Colorado Springs, recently merged with a competitor, CodeBaby to expand their solutions for health care with a mobile animated approach. The combined company will have over 35 employees and 10 full­-time contractors. The company is heavily into animation and have technology that they claim can gain insight into the patient’s emotions.

Next IT is perhaps the most experienced in NLU and AI and by far the largest, with about 160 employees, is located in Spokane Washington. It boasts of dozens of Fortune 500 clients including Amtrak, Web MD, Dell, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Aetna, Charter Communication and Alaska Airline to name a few.  One of the most interesting is Sargent Star — on www.GoArmy.com — a virtual recruiter who can answer thousands of questions about the Army.  Recently, Next IT received the Frost and Sullivan award for conversational AI. 

In medicine, Next IT services tens of thousands of patients suffering from multiple sclerosis currently using an avatar that was specifically built to help with this complex and devastating illness. They have also conquered the language barrier by creating an avatar that speaks Portugese for a company located in Brazil, Tam Airlines.

AI and NLU are the gateway to changing patient behavior and in turn the health of our nation. The ability to use an automated, “caring” motivational interviewing mechanism to “talk” to patients daily about their concerns, their medical financial issues, their fears, their sense of the illness, their adherence and their side effects is a game changer.  These three companies are poised to do with conversation what all of our treatment technologies have not done: get individual patients to change their behavior and reverse our collective deteriorating health.

Disclosure: Dr Morrow is Chief Medical Officer of Next IT.