BackgroundConversational assistants, such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, are ubiquitous and are beginning to be used as portals for medical services. However, the potential safety issues of using conversational assistants for medical information by patients and consumers are not understood.ObjectiveTo determine the prevalence and nature of the harm that could result from patients or consumers using conversational assistants for medical information.MethodsParticipants were given medical problems to pose to Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, and asked to determine an action to take based on information from the system. Assignment of tasks and systems were randomized across participants, and participants queried the conversational assistants in their own words, making as many attempts as needed until they either reported an action to take or gave up. Participant-reported actions for each medical task were rated for patient harm using an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality harm scale.ResultsFifty-four subjects completed the study with a mean age of 42 years (SD 18). Twenty-nine (54%) were female, 31 (57%) Caucasian, and 26 (50%) were college educated. Only 8 (15%) reported using a conversational assistant regularly, while 22 (41%) had never used one, and 24 (44%) had tried one “a few times.“ Forty-four (82%) used computers regularly. Subjects were only able to complete 168 (43%) of their 394 tasks. Of these, 49 (29%) reported actions that could have resulted in some degree of patient harm, including 27 (16%) that could have resulted in death.ConclusionsReliance on conversational assistants for actionable medical information represents a safety risk for patients and consumers. Patients should be cautioned to not use these technologies for answers to medical questions they intend to act on without further consultation from a health care provider.
Brain edema, leading to intracranial hypertension and brain herniation, is a major cause of death in fulminant liver failure. Astrocyte swelling is a prominent neuropathological feature in experimental fulminant liver failure. It has been postulated that the osmotic effects of glutamine, generated in astrocytes from ammonia and glutamate in a reaction catalyzed by glutamine synthetase, could mediate brain swelling. Normal rats and rats that received a portacaval anastomosis were infused with ammonium acetate or a sodium acetate control; brain water in cerebral cortex was measured with the gravimetry method, intracranial pressure by means of a cisterna magna catheter and cortical amino acids using high-performance liquid chromatography. Although brain edema was detected in both groups receiving ammonia, it was of a greater magnitude in portacaval anastomosis rats (80.94% + 0.17% vs. 80.24% + 0.09%, p < 0.01), resulting in the development of intracranial hypertension. When portacaval anastomosis rats were infused with ammonium acetate and pretreated with 150 mg/kg methionine-sulfoximine, an inhibitor of glutamine synthetase activity, brain edema was ameliorated and intracranial pressure did not rise. A dose-dependent reduction in brain glutamine levels was seen with increasing doses of methionine-sulfoximine; however, brain edema did not decrease beyond the 150 mg/kg dose, suggesting that the increase in brain water was not solely a result of glutamine accumulation. We conclude that brain edema of a magnitude that results in intracranial hypertension is more likely to develop in rats after portacaval anastomosis receiving a continuous ammonia infusion. The osmotic effects of glutamine appear to mediate, but only in part, the increase in brain water seen in this preparation.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Research on the psychology of humor indicates that humor can increase the impact of persuasive messages in certain circumstances, suggesting that virtual agents could use humor to improve the effectiveness of motivational counseling with users. To explore this idea, we developed two virtual agents that attempt to motivate users to perform healthy behaviors ś either to increase exercise or fruit and vegetable consumption ś and systematically vary whether they use humor or not in their counseling conversations. Humanauthored jokes were selected from a large corpus based on the nature of the humor (empathetic affiliative humor that serves to build relational closeness), health topic relevance, and subjective ratings of funniness, as well as relevance to user stage of behavior change. We evaluated our agents in a two-treatment counterbalanced within-subjects experiment, where participants interacted with a humorous and non-humorous agent motivating either exercise or healthy diet. We found the interaction with the humorous agent led to a significantly greater change in motivation to engage in the target behavior than interacting with the non-humorous agent.
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