Talking to Ana : A Mobile Self-Anamnesis Application with Conversational User Interface

Normally, a physician is collecting a patient’s medical history under time pressure during the initial patient interview. This leads to incomplete, erroneous data with negative effects on treatment and patient safety. The objective of this work is to introduce a concept for a self-anamnesis realized as a mobile application for patients. We implement the concept for the concrete example of self-anamnesis in music therapy. For this purpose, requirements are collected in discussions with music therapists. A conversational user interface is chosen to simulate the patienttherapist conversation. The self-anamnesis application is equipped with 63 questions that are asked subsequently to the user. We have chosen a rule-based approach for realizing the chat conversation and used the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) for encapsulating the questions and responses of the chatbot. In contrast to digital questionnaires, the application of a conversational user interface in the context of collecting information regarding a patient’s medical history, provides several benefits: the user can be encouraged to complete all queries and can ask clarifying questions in case something is unclear.