Impressive for a Robot: In-Home Care AI Assistants Included in Artificial Intelligence Solutions Adopted by the Australian Healthcare Sector

Peta Rolls grew accustomed to receiving Aida's daily check-in each morning.

A routine morning call by an automated voice assistant wasn't initially included in the care package Rolls envisioned when she enrolled for St Vincent’s in-home support but when she was invited to be part of the trial several months back, the elderly lady agreed because she wanted to help. Although, to be honest, her expectations were low.

Even so, when the call came through, she says: “I was so overtaken by how responsive she was. It was impressive for a robot.”

“She’d always ask ‘how you are today?’ and that gives you an opportunity if you’re feeling sick to mention your symptoms, or I just say ‘I'm well, thanks’.”

“She would go on to ask questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”

The virtual assistant would also ask what the user had planned for the day and “it would reply appropriately.”

“If I would say I’m going shopping, it would ask are you shopping for clothes or groceries? It was quite engaging.”

AI Reducing the Workload on Medical Staff

This pilot, which has recently concluded its initial stage, is an example in which progress in artificial intelligence are being taken up in healthcare.

Digital health company the provider partnered with St Vincent’s about the program to use its advanced AI system to provide social interaction, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to log any medical concerns or concerns for a staff member to follow up.

A senior director, national director of St Vincent’s At Home, explains the AI check-in being trialled does not replace any in-person visits.

“Recipients still receive a regular face to face meeting, but between these meetings … the [AI] system allows a routine call, which can then flag any possible issues to either our team or a client’s family,” Jones says.

Dr Tina Campbell, the managing director of Healthily, says there have been no any negative events noted from the pilot program.

Healthily employs advanced AI “with very clear guardrails and prompts” to guarantee the conversation is safe and mechanisms are in place to respond to serious health issues quickly, the director says. As an instance, if a patient is reporting chest pains, it would be alerted to the medical staff and the call ended so the person could call emergency services.

Campbell believes AI has an significant part given staffing shortages throughout the medical industry.

“The benefit very safely, using such systems, is lessen the administrative load on the workforce so trained clinicians can focus on performing the duties that they specialize in,” she comments.

AI Not as New as Often Believed

An expert, the founder of the national AI health alliance, says established types of artificial intelligence have been a standard part of healthcare for a considerable period, frequently in “back office services” such as interpreting scans, ECGs and lab reports.

“Software that performs a function that involves decision making in certain aspects is AI, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” says Coiera, who is also the head of the Centre for Health Informatics at a leading university.

“When visiting the imaging department, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in equipment doing just that.”

In recent years, newer forms of artificial intelligence called “machine learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows systems to learn from very large sets of data – have been used to interpret medical imaging and enhance detection, Coiera notes.

In November, BreastScreen NSW became Australia’s first population-based screening program to adopt machine reading technology to assist radiologists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

These represent advanced systems that still require a specialist doctor to interpret the diagnosis they could indicate, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment rests with the healthcare provider, the professor says.

The Function of AI in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in the city has been working alongside researchers from a UK university who first developed artificial intelligence techniques to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities known as focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions trigger epileptic episodes that crequently are resistant with medication, meaning surgery to excise the tissue becomes the only treatment available. But, the procedure can only be performed if the surgeons can locate the abnormal tissue.

In research recently released in the scientific publication, a group from the research body, led by neurologist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, demonstrated their “AI epilepsy detective” could detect the lesions in up to 94% of cases from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have historically been missed in more than half of patients (sixty percent).

The system was trained on the images of a group of individuals and then evaluated with 17 children and adult patients. Of the 17 children, 12 had surgery and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool uses neural network classifiers comparable with the breast cancer screening – highlighting regions of abnormality, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “speeding up the process to get to the answers,” Macdonald-Laurs says.

She stresses the researchers are currently in initial stages of the work, with a additional research necessary to advance the tool toward clinical implementation.

Prof Mark Cook, a brain specialist who was independent from the research, says MRI scans now generate such huge amounts of detailed information that it is challenging for a human to review it accurately. So for doctors the difficulty of locating these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how artificial intelligence can support doctors in making quicker, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to improve operation opportunities and results for kids with otherwise intractable epilepsy,” the professor says.

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the deputy head of the European Public Health Association’s digital health and artificial intelligence section, explains advanced AI systems are also helping to monitor and predict epidemics.

The expert, who presented last month at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in Wollongong, gave as an example Blue Dot, a company established by infectious disease specialists and which was one of the first organisations to detect the Covid-19 outbreak.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of deep learning, in which the technology can produce original material using training data. Such applications in healthcare encompass tools such as the virtual assistant as well as the AI scribes clinicians are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the head of the Royal Australian College of GPs, reports family doctors have been embracing digital assistants, which captures the consultation and turns into a medical summary that can be included in the patient record.

The president states the main benefit of the scribes is that it improves the quality of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the chair of the Australian Medical Association, agrees that AI note-takers are assisting doctors optimise their time and says AI can also help to prevent duplication of tests and scans for their patients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization