Dóris Chatbot: Personal assistant to help indicate a medical specialty

Abstract

Conversational interfaces have gained visibility due to recent technological advances in the use of Artificial Intelligence. In the health area, this type of interface can be very useful for applications that directly interact with the patient, therefore, simulating contact with a health agent. In addition, many patients, when having certain symptoms, usually make a partial self-diagnosis, without a clinical basis, and make an appointment with a specialist doctor, without first asking the opinion of a general practitioner. In this context, the objective of the research was to develop a chatbot platform in the health area, using the agent Dóris, with the functionality of pre-medical consultation to indicate the most appropriate medical specialty for patients with cough. The platform was developed using IBM Watson for natural language processing together with an inference engine for decision making.