Baidu, the Chinese search has developed a virtual version of “turn your head and cough.” It launched “Melody”, a chatbot that uses AI to help doctors care for patients over text.
Baidu focuses to make medical consults more accessible and help patients determine whether or not they should see a doctor in person. For example, if you tell it your child is sick, it might ask whether she has a fever or jaundice and will follow up with additional questions.
Melody connects with the Baidu’s own Doctor App and will ask the patient preliminary questions and pulls data from digitized textbooks, research papers, online forums and other healthcare sources. It will produce a hypothesis about the treatment options that a human doctor edits and will send to the patient. According to Andrew Ng, Baidu’s chief scientist, it’s just the beginning of AI-driven healthcare.
