Impressive for a Robot: Home Care AI Assistants Included in Artificial Intelligence Solutions Being Embraced by the Australian Healthcare Sector

Peta Rolls grew accustomed to getting the AI's daily check-in at 10am.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the care package the participant envisioned when she enrolled for St Vincent’s in-home support but when they asked to participate in the trial several months back, the 79-year-old said yes because she wanted to help. Although, to be honest, her hopes were low.

Even so, when she got the call, she says: “I was so overtaken by how responsive she 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 mention your symptoms, or I might reply ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

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

The virtual assistant would also ask what Rolls was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“If I would say I’m going shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

Bots Easing the Administrative Burden on Healthcare Professionals

The trial, which has recently concluded its first phase, is an example in which advances in artificial intelligence are being integrated in healthcare.

Digital health company Healthily approached the care organization regarding the trial to utilize its advanced AI system to offer companionship, as well as an opportunity for home care clients to log any medical concerns or concerns for a caregiver to address.

A senior director, national director of the home care division, explains the service being trialled is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Clients continue to get a regular personal visit, but in between visits … the automated system allows a routine call, which can then escalate any possible issues to either our team or a family members,” the director notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the managing director of the company, reports there haven’t been any negative events reported from the St Vincent’s trial.

Healthily uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the conversation is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to serious health issues promptly, the director says. For example, if a patient is reporting heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the care team and the call ended so the individual could call emergency services.

She thinks artificial intelligence has an significant part given staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“The benefit securely, with technology like this, is reduce the administrative load on the workforce so qualified health professionals can concentrate on performing the duties that they specialize in,” she says.

AI Not as New as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says older forms of AI have been a standard part of healthcare for a considerable period, frequently in “back office services” such as analyzing scans, cardiograms and pathology test results.

“Software that performs a task that involves decision making in certain aspects is AI, irrespective of how it achieves that,” states the professor, who is additionally the director of the health informatics center at Macquarie University.

“When visiting the imaging department, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you will find software in machines performing these tasks.”

In recent years, newer forms of AI called “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows algorithms to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and enhance detection, Coiera notes.

In November, a screening service became the nation's pioneering population-based screening program to introduce machine reading technology to assist radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

They are advanced systems that continue to need a specialist doctor to interpret the diagnosis they might suggest, and the accountability for a medical decision rests with the medical practitioner, the professor says.

The Function of AI in Identifying Illness Early

A research center in the city has been working alongside researchers from UCL London who first developed AI methods to detect epilepsy brain abnormalities called specific brain malformations from brain scans.

These lesions cause epileptic episodes that often are resistant with drugs, so surgery to remove them becomes the only treatment available. However, the surgery can proceed if the surgeons can pinpoint the affected area.

In research recently released in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the institute, led by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could detect the abnormalities in nearly all of cases from MRI and PET scans in a specific form of the malformations that have historically been overlooked in more than half of patients (60%).

The AI was developed using the scans of a group of individuals and then evaluated with 17 children and adult patients. Among the youngsters, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool uses neural network classifiers comparable with the breast cancer screening – flagging suspicious areas, which are still checked by experts “speeding up the process to get to the answers,” the researcher says.

She stresses the team are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a additional research necessary to get the technology heading towards real-world use.

Prof Mark Cook, a neurologist who was not involved in the study, notes modern imaging now produce such vast quantities of detailed information that it is challenging for a person to review it thoroughly. Thus for clinicians the difficulty of finding these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“It’s a great demonstration of how AI can assist doctors in making earlier, precise identifications, and has the ability to enhance surgical access and results for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” Cook comments.

Disease Detection in the Years Ahead

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

The expert, who spoke recently at the national health summit in the city, gave as an example Blue Dot, a company set up by infectious disease specialists and which was an early detector to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a further subset of deep learning, in which the technology can generate new content using training data. Such applications in healthcare include programs such as the virtual assistant as well as the automated note-takers clinicians are adopting more.

A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, says family doctors have been adopting digital assistants, which records the consultation and converts it to a medical summary that can be added to the health file.

Wright says the main benefit of the scribes is that it improves the quality of the communication between the doctor and patient.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the president of the national doctors' group, agrees that AI note-takers are assisting doctors manage schedules and says artificial intelligence also has the potential to prevent duplication of tests and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization