Robots Help Patients Manage Chronic Illness at Home

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Catalia Health uses artificial intelligence to help Mabu learn about each patient through daily conversations, which vary in length depending on the patient’s answers.

“A lot of conversations start off with ‘How are you feeling?’ similar to what a doctor or nurse might ask,” Kidd explains. “From there, it might go off in many directions. There are a few things doctors or nurses would ask if they could talk to these patients every day.”

For example, Mabu would ask heart failure patients how they are feeling, if they have shortness of breath, and about their weight.

“Based on patients’ answers, Mabu might say ‘You might want to call your doctor,’ or ‘I’ll send them this information,’ or ‘Let’s check in tomorrow,’” Kidd says.

Last year, Catalia Health announced a collaboration with the American Heart Association that has allowed Mabu to deliver the association’s guidelines for patients living with heart failure.

“A patient might say ‘I’m feeling terrible today’ and Mabu might ask ‘Is it one of these symptoms a lot of people with your condition deal with?’ We’re trying to get down to whether it’s the disease or the drug. When that happens, we do two things: Mabu has a lot of information about problems a patient might be dealing with, so she’s able to give quick feedback. Simultaneously, she’s sending that information to a clinician — a doctor, nurse, or pharmacists — whoever’s providing care.”

In addition to health care providers, Catalia also partners with pharmaceutical companies. In each case, patients pay nothing out of pocket for their robot companions. Although the data Catalia Health sends pharmaceutical companies is completely anonymized, it can help them follow their treatment’s effects on patients in real time and better understand the patient experience.

Details about many of Catalia Health’s partnerships have not been disclosed, but the company did announce a collaboration with Pfizer last month to test the impact of Mabu on patient treatment plans.

Over the next year, Kidd hopes to add to the company’s list of partnerships and help patients dealing a wider swath of diseases. Regardless of how fast Catalia Health scales, he says the service it provides will not diminish as Mabu brings its trademark attentiveness and growing knowledge base to every conversation.

“In a clinical setting, if we talk about a doctor with good bedside manner, we don’t mean that he or she has more clinical knowledge than the next person, we simply mean they’re better at connecting with patients,” Kidd says. “I’ve looked at the psychology behind that — what does it mean to be able to do that? — and turned that into the algorithms we use to help create conversations with patients.”

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