We’ve Launched a Health Chatbot on Skype

Sep 27, 2016
3 min read

We’d like to introduce you to the newest member of the RingMD team, Cardea. health chatbot Think of Cardea as your personal health aid. Ask her a question related to your health or tell her your symptoms, and she’ll provide you with relevant health information*. Want to speak to a real doctor? Cardea can also connect you to speak to qualified medical professional 24/7 through the secure RingMD telemedicine platform.

*But Cardea isn’t a real person***, she’s a bot.

Unlike general chatbots, Cardea offers a more personal experience as she was built on a sophisticated computer program designed to simulate a conversation with a medically-trained friend. By using language that is simple and easy to understand, Cardea becomes more accessible to people from all walks of life.

How is Cardea different?

Access to basic healthcare information in this manner is unprecedented, and is especially valuable for users in developing countries and rural villages, where healthcare information made free, and medical assistance more widely accessible, could mean the difference between life and death.

*Why did we take the time to build Cardea?*

We decided to create Cardea because we believe everyone should have free access to basic healthcare information, wherever and whenever they need it. What is important to understand is that having health information available online is not sufficient; people need to be able to find it when they need it. Cardea asks the right questions to understand your specific needs, then proceeds to make recommendations.

*As said by our partners at Microsoft:*

“Within the past year, the digital world has seen a barrage of bots. We are delighted that RingMD has chosen to build on the Microsoft Bot Framework. We are very excited to be part of the healthcare ecosystem that’s making highly personalised, virtual and affordable healthcare a reality in Asia,” said  Callum Bir, Director for the Health and Social Services Industry, Microsoft Asia Pacific.

*Getting a little technical – here’s some background on how we built her:*

To build Cardea, we used artificial intelligence (AI) to reach our mission of improving access to healthcare for all. Built for Skype and included in Microsoft’s Conversations as a Platform (CaaP), we’re using the latest technology to build a scalable health chatbot where the power of human language, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are applied pervasively through a computing interface and interaction.

While she's easy to understand and chat to, on the back end, Cardea is a complicated lady. She's built on a number of databases that include thousands of medical entries, descriptions of medical conditions and recommendations for how to deal with sickness. She also is programmed with medical symptom flows, similar to those that would be followed by your doctor in person.

  • Cardea provides her own recommendations that are founded on the expertise of leading medical professionals and institutions.