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Towards a Chatbot based Smart Pervasive Healthcare Medical Emergency Cases

Conference Paper · December 2019

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Nourchene Ouerhani Ahmed Maalel

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 Towards a Chatbot based Smart Pervasive
Healthcare
Medical Emergency Cases

Nourchène Ouerhani1 , Ahmed Maalel1,2 , and Henda Ben Ghézela2

1
University of Sousse, Higher Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology, 4003,
Sousse, Tunisia
nourchne ouerhani@yahoo.fr
2
University of Manouba, National School of Computer Sciences, RIADI Laboratory,
2010, Manouba, Tunisia
{ahmed.maalel,henda.benghezala}@ensi.rnu.tn

Abstract. Many people face death everyday because of severe medical

emergencies, however a basic knowledge of how to deal with such situa-
tions could save several human lives. To avoid deterioration of a victim’s
condition and maintaining his/her physical integrity, this paper aim at
developing a chatbot based smart pervasive healthcare to help victims
or incident witnesses properly perform first-aid in a medical emergency
situation until the aid arrives. Therefore, even a person with no first aid
skills, could help a victim to survive by performing first aid support as
suggested by the virtual assistant. This assistance make ordinary people
more confident to become a rescuer.

Keywords: Chatbot · Medical Emergency Assistance · Artificial Intel-

ligence · E-health · Natural Language Processing.

1 Introduction
The rise of chatbots inspired many researches to adopt chatbots into health-
care to avail of their multiple advantages. One of the oldest examples includes
Eliza [11]. However, to the best of our knowledge, very few works [2,3,1] use
them to manage medical emergencies. In fact, when facing a medical emergency
case and human lives are on the line, there is a need of performing an imme-
diate treatment to the victim. Unfortunately,the current prehospital emergency
process [7] shows that the emergency medical staff would take a lot of time to
locate the emergency incident spot [7]. Even worse, people who are present in
the emergency spot may not interfere because most of them have no skills in
first aid. Even more severe, there are persons who take advantage of such situa-
tions to share it on social media . Given the previously outlined circumstances,
a chatbot based smart pervasive healthcare is proposed in this paper in order to
save time during medical emergencies and to provide care starting immediately
to the victim or his companions. The remainder of the paper is organized as
follows: First, we explain our approach in 2. Then, we evaluate our work by a
2 N. Ouerhani et al.

test case in 3. And finally in 4, we conclude the work and give some future works
for interesting research directions.

2 Proposed Approach
The proposed chatbot is designed to be able to help victims or companion per-
form first aid work properly.

Fig. 1. Architecture of the Chatbot based Smart Pervasive Healthcare

Our proposed chatbot’s architecture is depicted in Figure 1. It is divided

into several modules as follows: Input Pre-processor module (IPM), Natural
Language Pipeline , Storage module (SM) and Response Engine (RE).
When the chatbot receives a message (text/voice) that will be pre-processed
by the IPM to bring out a text whatever is its initial form. In case of a voice
input, IPM should convert the speech to text through the speech recognition [4].
Then, the Natural Language Pipeline’s main task is to convert the natu-
ral language text received form the IPM into a structured format consisting of
intents and entities. Thus, to properly realize the natural language processing
(NLP), it is required to transform the text to the vector domain which is referred
as word embedding [8,6]. Our solution is to simply train the pre-trained model
GloVe [6] on our domain specific medical data. Since the embeddings are already
trained and entities are extracted [10], our intent classifier [9] requires only little
training to make confident intent predictions that are relative to the ongoing
emergency case.
In order to be more efficient our chatbot is able to store all information
the user provided once he/she starts communicating with the platform such as
location, as well as information gathered during the ongoing discussion in order
to influence how the dialogue progresses. All these data will be consulted later
 Chatbot based Smart Pervasive Healthcare 3

on by the RE in order to respond to the user, or request more information if

required.
The RE’s task is formulated as a classification problem, over a predefined
list of actions for each emergency case. The generated answers are based on the
information stored in the SM. An immediately response is generated once there
are sufficient information describing the emergency situation, otherwise, if there
are some missing information which are crucial for the bot better understand
the situation, it will keep requesting information from the user according to
the St John DRSABCD action plan 3 that we learnt before having a first aid
certification from the civil protection in our Tunisian government. This process
will be repeated until the bot has enough knowledge of the emergency victim’s
state to generate helpful first aid tips. More over, the chatbot is able to send
a real time alert to the emergency medical service when the situation presents
high risk to the victim and individuals on the scene.

3 Experimental Set up: Application Development and

Deployment
We have developed two separate but inter-dependent applications: The mobile
application that will be used by the user and the chatbot back-end. However,
the implementation of health information management via mobile devices poses
many problems, such as storage and data management so we used the cloud,
where each of the proposed modules is written as web services which are exposed
as REST API micro services on the cloud, as shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. Implementation of chatbot based Smart Pervasive healthcare

The chatbot asks specific questions to understand the victim’s condition.

The user is free whether to write his own answer or to choose one of the answers
suggested by the chatbot, this method allows a faster response time from the
3
https://www.stjohnnsw.com.au/drsabcd-action-plan/
4 N. Ouerhani et al.

user. Once the chatbot understands the victim’s situation, first aid is performed
before aid arrives. The implemented process is shown in Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Responses of Chatbot based Smart Pervasive healthcare amongst a victim

suffers from epistaxis (nosebleed)

4 Conclusions and Future Works

We proposed to develop a chatbot based smart pervasive healthcare, which is de-

signed to help people react well in medical emergency cases. The pervasiveness of
our chatbot is clear since it is available anytime and is accessible from everywhere
and for every body including experts or normal people and its context-aware
since its response differs on the medical emergency case and the user supplies
information. We introduced the chatbot architecture by proposing the notion
of its several modules. The current system has foundations in each domain in-
cluding a response engine and other natural language processing tool-kits. We
used GloVe to solve the NLP problem in our case because it works well accord-
ing to our evaluation experiments. The work is still under implementation and
much further work is needed to improve our chatbot’s capability to manage more
emergency cases.

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