An artificially intelligent digital assistant in Denmark is currently being used to help medical rescuers in diagnosing emergency callers of heart attack or cardiac arrest by analysing non-verbal clues. Creators say the assistant can detect fatal medical conditions faster than humans, even from a distance.
Corti has become a great help for dispatchers in Copenhagen as it is employed on the line to parse callers for emergency line 112. Corti uses a speech recognition software to transcribe the exchange and machine learning to examine the words, descriptions and other clues in the background that point to a heart attack or cardiac arrest diagnosis.
Also read: Broken heart may be responsible for heart attacks: Study
The bot notifies medical personnel in real time once it finds symptoms that the caller or anyone in the background is on the brink of suffering.
"If you and I have a problem, we end up Googling or asking people," says Andreas Cleve, chief executive at Corti. "These people are handling more or less the worst days of our lives but they have no tools to do it."
Based on a small-scale study, Cleve says well-trained medical personnel in Copenhagen can detect cardiac arrest over the phone around 73 per cent of the time. Corti, on the other hand, can recognise the danger based on descriptions around 95 per cent of the time. Even so, the company is yet to publish soon the results of its new study involving 170,000 calls.
Cleve stresses the ultimate goal of Corti, like any other AI-powered technologies, is to supplement humans and not to replace.
"As consumers and patients, do we prefer a healthcare system run by bots, or would we still from an ethical and personal perspective still prefer human contact?" Cleve asks Fast Company. "To me, it's super obvious. I would always, especially when it comes to my health, prefer human contact. But augmented by a supportive system that might be using AI–that, to me, is sort of an end-game scenario."
Corti is yet to announce its expansion plans in the US.
