AI-Based Digital Health Assistant (ALPHA-KI)

Motivation

Innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are transforming industries around the world. Especially in the complex medical domain, AI has the potential to revolutionize how healthcare is delivered. It is used to analyze and interpret large amounts of medical data for improving diagnostics and treatment management. There are already a number of research studies showing that AI-based systems can perform as well as or even better than humans in certain healthcare tasks.

In view of the major challenges faced by the healthcare sector, such as aging populations, lifestyle-related chronic diseases or global staff shortages, there is a strong need for researching AI-based technologies in practice. Hence, this project was built around the idea of creating an empathic digital health assistant for chronically ill people.

Focus and Goals

The purpose of the digital health assistant ALPHA is to make the everyday life of those in need of care healthier, safer and more entertaining. ALPHA comes in form of a smartwatch that is always worn on the body. As a voice-based device, it is controlled through natural language alone. The overarching goal of this research project involves four AI-related focal points:

Efficient AI platform for storing health data, running Machine Learning algorithms and doing large-scale data analytics.
Detection of emergency situations: location, movement and vital data are automatically evaluated in real time with autoregressive and incremental predictive analysis.
Continuous beat-to-beat blood pressure measurement: an automated "virtual sensor" (predictive analytics) enables continuous measurement without additional devices
Empathic dialog management: Through empathic dialog management and continuous learning, the conversations with ALPHA tend to become more like a real human conversation. The main focus lies on intelligent, knowledge-grounded dialog management as well as using emphatic language patterns.