Improving Remote Elderly Care with Chatbots
Executive Summary
An Elderly Care Facility based in Shanghai, China, experienced an increase in geriatric patients. They observed signs of loneliness, accidents at home, and clinical dementia in patients who were living alone. The Care Facility engaged Xavor to create a virtual care chatbot to assist patients at home by monitoring physical and mental health and providing company to the elderly.
Xavor’s team of engineers and designers deployed a chatbot with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI capabilities. This enterprise-grade AI assistant provided support to the caregivers, physiotherapists, support team, promoters, data collectors, and researchers within the care facility. It was developed to be life-like and conversational to enact Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) for elderly patients.
The resulting AI-enabled chatbot was fully equipped to provide emotional support and medical assistance to the elderly at home when their medical team was unavailable. The Bot could also alert relevant medical care providers in case of an emergency. This chatbot’s availability was extended to five cities within China where the care facility’s infrastructure existed.
Challenge
For the last 25 years, an Elderly Care Facility has dealt with geriatric care and monitoring in Shanghai, China. Meanwhile, there is a growing concern over the number of older people and the alarming lack of caregivers to look after them. With this need for an extra pair of hands, the global stress on healthcare during the difficult times of the pandemic further limited the access to in-person patient-doctor and patient-carer communication within the care home.
Along with this, there was a challenging task for psychological distress and loneliness among existing elders, the absence of coordination between professionals, and time management among facilitators.
According to the organization’s statistics, more than 50% of people above the age of 75 live alone. Loneliness has been found to increase the likelihood of the mortality rate, and lonely elders have a 64% increased chance of developing clinical dementia and falls.
Xavor was asked to deploy their virtual care home assistant to tackle this sensitive and challenging situation.
Solution
Xavor’s engineers and designers proposed a robust chatbot with natural language processing (NLP) abilities as an appropriate companion for older people. This enterprise-grade conversational AI assistant was designed to act as an ally to the caregivers, physiotherapists, support team, promoters, data collectors, and researchers within the care facility.
It is capable of conducting a conversation with humans using textual and auditory methods in both English and Chinese language. It communicates seamlessly in a life-like neural voice along with a custom wake-up word activation and minimum delay in responses. The Bot’s design revolves around CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), which serves as a sympathetic caregiver for the elderly while identifying the user’s sentiment.
The system investigates how users’ verbosity, emotion, and self-disclosure behavior depend on the topic under discussion and the avatar’s tone and how they evolve with time. The Bot is configured to handle queries on more than 7,500 FAQs, along with information on personalized consultation history and illness reporting.
The care facility welcomed the virtual care agent, which would have been seen as “improper” just a few months ago, to treat and attend to elderly and patients remotely and offer them companionship just like their trained caregivers provide. The primary-care facility and special-care doctors associated with the organization have switched remotely from the pandemic’s beginning. Although this idea proposed by Xavor’s engineers seemed quite farfetched to the care professionals, more and more of their patients have become comfortable reaching out to doctors and sharing intimate details about their health virtually through screens.
A periodic updating agreement now also provides this company with the peace of mind that the system’s integrity will be maintained on an ongoing basis.
Results
With a completely new company-wide approach to cater to the elderly remotely at their homes, this care home is experiencing a surge in popularity of overall users engaging with the organization, resultantly reducing the high demand for on-site caregivers. The chatbot enforced can now automate the whole process of serving the elderly when the support givers are busy or unavailable, consequently reducing the burden on healthcare professionals. The 24×7 availability has increased patient engagement, helping address specific issues and elevate the resolution rate.
The conversational assistant learns from its users over time, measuring symptom prevalence, mood, and behavior. The company uses the software to gather large amounts of data that could not be measured in a traditional in-person facility. Unlike simply reading static information online like other chatbots, this data is being used to tailor the resources to a patient’s needs and train the QnA model and the context-aware assistant. An online learning mechanism and cloud deployment is helping the Bot to improve over time.
Moreover, the artificially intelligent Bot can sense a person’s health and alert doctors and families concerning changes in their conditions and potential emergencies. The care facility previously present in 5 big cities in China is now available to those on-site as well as in the general environment. The chatbot solution also offers additional services such as scheduling appointments, locating healthcare facilities, encouraging clinical trials, and catering to the entertainment needs of the elderly. The system is designed to provide instant empathetic support to the older adults available.
Following the successful completion of this project at the Elderly Care Facility, potential assistive solutions are also being explored by Xavor for other scenarios across the wider company group.
Benefits
Xavor’s conversational virtual agent uses a unique algorithm to interpret multiple indicators simultaneously, ensuring accuracy and minimizing the risk of user dissatisfaction. The users feel more valued and validated.
The chatbot provides the following unique benefits:
- It is actively helping the company to engage its users by answering FAQs and delivering context to conversations.
- Provides more personalized questions geared toward the patients’ habits, automatically attaches itself to the patient record, and gives doctors and caregivers an immediate picture of their pre-screened health status.
- Data collected during these interactions also provides comprehensive insights to save users time and make the organization influential in their care.
- Provides more tailored conclusions and assistance than self-research using Google.
- Designed to provide security solutions and critical safeguarding techniques at the backend to ensure sensitive data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands.
Without visiting the care facility, there is an upgraded level of communication and comfort for older adults, filling the void for lonely pensioners. On the other hand, the elderly being fragile can limit their exposure to potentially catching another disease at the healthcare facility.
Xavor’s Bot streamlines the elderly’s stance at every stage in the service process and aids the support caregivers and doctors at any time and place.
About Xavor
Xavor’s gerontech ecosystem holds great potential for turning a population crisis into a growth opportunity for the world. Progress in this area will allow the elderly to truly age with dignity and increase the span of functional life. Xavor endeavors to create a frontier of gerontech innovation that will open avenues for uninhibited growth.
Xavor is a digital transformation partner for global leaders in life sciences and high-tech manufacturing. Its legacy is one of designing and developing best-in-class custom applications and providing mission-critical support, maintenance, customization, and integration of enterprise systems.
Xavor's global footprint allows it to serve customers across the globe. Headquartered in Irvine, California, the company also has innovation labs in China and a delivery network in Pakistan.
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