It is now common to consult health topics on the internet, to find explanations about symptoms, diseases, diagnoses, medications, vaccines, treatments and lifestyles. With this behavior in mind, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed, still with many deficiencies, according to the first experiences, an artificial intelligence chat. Sarah, presented this Tuesday, was created to answer questions and give health tips.
The Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health (Sarah) had already been tested during the pandemic under another name, Florence. However, it resurfaces, this time, with a new language model, more advanced technology and, for now, in eight languages.
Sarah answers very general questions with minimal empathy and always recommends going to the doctor. It is assumed to be capable of providing information on key health topics, but in tests carried out in these first stages it was unable to provide links to more specific medical information and was limited to offering very general recommendations or a basic list of information or associated symptoms to some diseases.
Despite the shortcomings of this launch, the WHO chose not to miss the artificial intelligence train, without letting the technology associated with health information fall into the hands of companies with economic and commercial interests. Like any AI system, Sarah aspires to grow with human interaction.
The Organization also admits the deficiencies of the current system. In this sense, the WHO director asks “for help from the research community to continue exploring how this technology can reduce inequalities and help people find up-to-date and reliable health information”.
“The future of health is digital and supporting countries to harness the power of health technologies is a priority,” explained Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, in a statement. “Sarah gives us an idea of how artificial intelligence could be used in the future to improve access to health information in a more interactive way.”
The avatar was developed by Soul Machines with support from Rooftop and, the WHO warns that “responses may not always be accurate because they are based on patterns and probabilities in available data”. In this sense, the organization warns that it is not responsible for any conversational content created by generative AI nor does it “represent or understand the opinions or beliefs of the WHO”.
The final warning to the user is decisive: “You understand and accept that you should not rely on the responses generated as the only source of true or factual information, nor as a substitute for professional advice”.
IBM has Watson Health, a chat robot available at any time that collects basic information.
In the professional area, Microsoft develops Azure Health Bot, a conversational system based on medical information, classification protocols and language models trained to understand clinical terminology.
Google also entered this market with the family of models integrated with MedLM. Greg Corrado, head of Artificial Intelligence for Health at the company, highlights radiographic image analysis tools and AMIE, an application “optimized for diagnostic reasoning and conversation that emulates interactions between the patient and the professional”.
Source: O Globo
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Tags: launches artificial intelligence avatar health tips information diseases
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