CHITCHAT: Clinical History Taking Chatbot Mobile App for Medical Students

Principal Investigator: Dr. John T.H. YUEN (Assistant Professor from Department of Computer Science)

This project is showcased in the second exhibition – Digitization in Innovation Wing Two

About the scholar

Dr. John T.H. YUEN

Research interests:
• Cryptography
• Blockchain
• Privacy
• FinTech
• AI
Email: thyuen@cs.hku.hk
Website: https://i.cs.hku.hk/~thyuen

Project information

Undergraduate medical education has been severely affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. While lectures can be easily conducted online via Zoom, clinical bedside teachings, including training of history taking skills from patients, cannot be easily replaced. 

Novelty

  • A novel chatbot mobile app for training of undergraduate medical students’ clinical history taking skills was developed in 2021.
  • Chatbot will provide relevant answers according to the pre-defined keyword database.

Result

  • A case-control study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of learning with chatbot mobile app, versus conventional bedside teachings with real patients.
  • Students’ performance in clinical history taking were comparable between the conventional group and chatbot group (p >0.05). With the promising results that we have found in this study, we believe training of history taking skills by chatbot will be a feasible alternative to conventional bedside teaching.
Project images
Project images
The user interface of the clinical history teaching chatbot mobile app. The user acts as the doctor and the AI chatbot is a patient with some disease.
Framework for handling questions from users. Different keywords are classified into different categories for searching the answer in the database.
Achievement of the Project
Enquiry / Feedback

Please feel free to give your enquiry / feedbacks to the research team by filling the form (https://forms.gle/JV59N47nTj19ndYz6). Thank you!