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The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare:

Physical & Virtual Humans

Robots are no longer science fiction. At Omnicom Health Group (OHG), we understand that robots are becoming more affordable, accessible, and easily integrated into our daily lives. In the healthcare space, we are beginning to see robots with real world applicability in the home, as well as chatbots that enable physicians and patients to more readily access the information they need.

July 2017

Advancements in AI and Robotics

Democratization of Robots

Virtual Healthcare Bots

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Let us know what you think at technology@omnicomhealthgroup.com

2© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Advancements in AI and Robotics1

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years have enabled substantial growth in robotics in the healthcare space. A recent Frost and Sullivan report indicates that healthcare providers and consumers will be spending more the $6 billion every year on artificial intelligence tools by 2021.

AI will never replace doctors, but rather the power of AI will go toward robots sparing doctors some of the time-absorbing tasks that can lead to fatigue. By providing access to more medical information than a single doctor can possess, robots can also help democratize diagnosis and care at healthcare facilities that cannot afford or do not have access to teams of highly specialized doctors. One recent report from Scalar Market Research predicts that the medical robotics market will increase from $5.38 billion in 2016 to $14.56 billion by 2022.

Normally when we think of robots in the traditional sense, we imagine large human-like machines that lack emotion and appear in Hollywood movies. However, robots are any machines capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, and are programmable by a computer. Though the realm of robotics is expanding, we are still seeing robots with human-like qualities being built.

3© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Advancements in AI and Robotics (cont’d)1

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

A company in Japan is creating “carebots,” which are robots specifically designed to assist elderly people. This industry is growing rapidly in Japan with 25% of their population is over 65 years of age.

With Japan’s rapidly growing elderly population, there is a shortage of nursing home workers. In order to supplement human interaction, a robot named PALRO was created by FUJISOFT to lead therapy and exercise sessions at some retirement and private homes. Starting in 2013, the Japanese government began to provide subsidies for robots in nursing homes. Robots have become more normalized in healthcare environments in Japan, and it is predicted the same will soon be true in Western countries.

4© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Democratization of Robots

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

2Despite being more available than ever before, humanoid robots still tend to be expensive and hard to acquire. Companies such as IBM Watson and Google are trying to democratize robots by making them less expensive and easy to find and buy. Users are able to code and customize the robots themselves. They even come shelled in a customizable cardboard outer layer.

For example, the TJBot from IBM Watson aimed to make robots less scary, more accessible, and encourage users to engage with Watson’s services in an interactive way. This open source project to create a cardboard robot was named after IBM’s first chairman Thomas J. Watson.

The TJBots are essentially enclosures for Raspberry Pi. A Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized computer originally designed for education. Although slower than the average modern computer, it is still a complete Linux computer that operates at a low-power consumption level. GitHub provides different “recipes” or step-by-step instructions to help connect the TJBot to Watson. You can also create your own recipe using Watson’s application program interfaces (APIs).

5© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

Democratization of Robots (cont’d)2

Google similarly released a cardboard bot called AIY in partnership with MagPi, which is the official Rasberry Pi magazine. MagPi released a special edition issue of their magazine that was bundled in the project from Google. AIY is a play on words with AI for artificial intelligence and DIY for do-it-yourself. AIY allows you to create a voice-controlled assistant that can perform simple tasks, such as turning on lights or telling the weather forecast.

TJBot and AIY are both examples of how robots are becoming more ubiquitous and easily accessible. As this trend continues, we will see more robots in healthcare environments.

Omnicom Health Group and IBM Watson brought a few TJBots to the Lions Health MedTech Expo at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity in June. Using a combination of APIs, including speech to text, conversation, text to speech, and tone analyzer, three TJBots were programmed for the expo. The goal was to emphasize the simplicity of creating robots using minimal APIs and show how few are needed to offer a full Watson solution.

The first TJBot is a Chit Chat bot that answers questions about Cannes and France. The second is a bot that changes colors based on answers to certain questions, and the third is a music therapy bot.

The music therapy bot uses speech to text, text to speech, tone analyzer, and natural language processing to identify the type of music that may make a person happier. Each tone has a song connected to it that the bot will play depending on how the user responds to certain questions.

6© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Virtual Healthcare Bots3

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

Aside from the physical robots that we typically think of, there are chatbots and avatars being used to improve healthcare. Chatbots are “chat-robots” that model how humans work to message back and forth. Chatbots are becoming more popular since messaging and one-on-one interaction is a natural type of engagement. Similarly, avatars are essentially chatbots with a virtual image, not housed in a physical robot “body.” Avatar faces are sometimes seen as beneficial to bring a more human element to the experience.

Conversa Health is a good example of a company using chatbots to improve the healthcare experience. Conversa believes that better conversations lead to better care. Their HIPAA-compliant chatbot uses “clinically-intelligent conversation technology to deliver smart, automated patient conversation experiences.” The goal of their chatbot is to manage the doctor-patient relationship between visits by providing reminders on medicine information, scheduling appointments, and obtaining health information and concerns from patients that is then integrated into their electronic health record.

7© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Virtual Healthcare Bots (cont’d)3

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

The chatbot is tied to clinical data from each health profile and automatically sends messages on a schedule based on the patient’s clinical needs. Although messages are scaled and sent to all of a doctor’s patients, the conversation is always personalized. This conversation allows patients to take a more active role in their health. It also allows doctors to prioritize visits. There are about 1.2 billion office visits per year that only last around 15 minutes, and patients wait an average of 20 days to have an appointment. Conversa Health aims to alleviate some of this in-person visit inefficiency.

According to Conversa Health:

• 83% of patients do not adhere to their care plan

• 68% of physicians want to take advantage of patient-generated health data

• 90% of patients want to self-manage their health with technology

• $125 billion was spent on unnecessary office visits in the United States

8© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Virtual Healthcare Bots (cont’d)3

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

Sensely also aims to improve the care of patients in between visits through its AI-enabled virtual nurse avatars. This digital healthcare company has an avatar nurse called Olivia in the UK that integrates with information from the National Health Service.

Olivia allows you to create a symptom tracker, monitor chronic diseases, schedule an appointment, and ask questions about your care plan all within a safe and secure environment. When necessary, Olivia will also direct you to see a doctor, reach out for an emergency, identify a local pharmacy or healthcare access point, and provide self-care information or telemedicine all within one app that understands your natural language.

After receiving first place in the WIRED Health Startup Stage, Ivana Schnur, Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder at Sensely stated that “What gets us up in the morning at Sensely is democratizing the access to care, making it possible for patients to actually access the care when they need it and how they want it…making that little device we spend so much time on the vehicle for that, so they can do more and more wherever they are."

Sensely believes that if they can bring bedside manner through an avatar, rather than have a patient speak to a cold app without personality, they can improve the patient experience.

9© 2017 Omnicom Health Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion

Robots now come in all shapes and sizes with different levels of intelligence. As robots continue to improve and become more ubiquitous through advancements in artificial intelligence, we will begin to see them be adopted into healthcare settings.

Let us know what you think at technology@omnicomhealthgroup.com.

The Adoption of Robots in Healthcare

Sources & Further ReadingPaging Dr. Robot: The Coming AI Health Care Boom: https://www.fastcompany.com/3055256/paging-dr-robot-the-coming-ai-health-care-boom

Japan is running out of people to take care of the elderly, so it's making robots instead: http://www.businessinsider.com/japan-developing-carebots-for-elderly-care-2015-11

Are Western nursing homes ready for Japan's humanoid robots?: http://business.financialpost.com/executive/smart-shift/are-western-nursing-homes-ready-for-japans-humanoid-robots/wcm/813561cc-2f83-423d-a397-a135d4e73ab3

GitHub TJ Bot Recipes: https://github.com/ibmtjbot/tjbot/tree/master/recipes

TJ Bot: An open source project to connect to Watson services in a fun way: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/initiatives/activitykits/tjbot/

GET A FREE AIY PROJECTS VOICE KIT WITH THE MAGPI 57!: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/google-aiy-voice-magpi-57/

Conversa Health: https://conversahealth.com

WIRED Health Startup Stage Winner: Sensely | WIRED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP7NULAJimE