Chatbot-based heathcare service with a knowledge base for cloud computing

Abstract

With the recent increase in the interest of individuals in health, lifecare, and disease, hospital medical services have been shifting from a treatment focus to prevention and health management. The medical industry is creating additional services for health- and life-promotion programs. This change represents a medical-service paradigm shift due to the prolonged life expectancy, aging, lifestyle changes, and income increases, and consequently, the concept of the smart health service has emerged as a major issue. Due to smart health, the existing health-promotion medical services that typically have been operated by large hospitals have been developing into remote medical-treatment services where personal health records are used in small hospitals; moreover, a further expansion has been occurring in the direction of u-Healthcare in which health conditions are continuously monitored in the everyday lives of the users. However, as the amount of data is increasing and the medical-data complexity is intensifying, the limitations of the previous approaches are increasingly problematic; furthermore, since even the same disease can show different symptoms depending on the personal health conditions, lifestyle, and genome information, universal healthcare is not effective for some patients, and it can even generate severe side effects. Thus, research on the AI-based healthcare that is in the form of mining-based smart health, which is a convergence technology of the 4IR, is actively being carried out. Particularly, the introduction of various smart medical equipment for which healthcare big data and a running machine have been combined and the expansion of the distribution of smartphone wearable devices have led to innovations such as personalized diagnostic and treatment services and chronic-disease management and prevention services. In addition, various already launched applications allow users to check their own health conditions and receive the corresponding feedback in real time. Based on these innovations, the preparation of a way to determine a user’s current health conditions, and to respond properly through contextual feedback in the case of unsound health conditions, is underway. However, since the previously made healthcare-related applications need to be linked to a wearable device, and they provide medical feedback to users based solely on specific biometric data, inaccurate information can be provided. In addition, the user interfaces of some healthcare applications are very complicated, causing user inconvenience regarding the attainment of desired information. Therefore, we propose a chatbot-based healthcare service with a knowledge base for cloud computing. The proposed method is a mobile health service in the form of a chatbot for the provision of fast treatment in response to accidents that may occur in everyday life, and also in response to changes of the conditions of patients with chronic diseases. A chatbot is an intelligent conversation platform that interacts with users via a chatting interface, and since its use can be facilitated by linkages with the major social network service messengers, general users can easily access and receive various health services. The proposed framework enables a smooth human–robot interaction that supports the efficient implementation of the chatbot healthcare service. The design of the framework comprises the following four levels: data level, information level, knowledge level, and service level.