From Books to Bots: Using Medical Literature to Create a Chat Bot

Abstract

The American Medical Association Family Medical Guide is a comprehensive medical reference book for non-medical professionals. The book uses a series of flow charts to help users diagnose their symptoms by answering yes and no questions. The idea presented in this paper is to leverage the information in the book to make a chat bot for a mobile phone user. We develop a tool for crowd workers to train the chat bot using the information in the book. We present a framework for the crowd worker. Information is classified as symptom, diagnosis, or care. The chat bot makes the information accessible to people that primarily use a mobile phone and are not medical professionals. By having the data on the phone, we are able to make the data actionable by integrating it with the computational capabilities and sensors of the phone.