Systematic Evaluation of Healthcare Chatbots: Roles, Benefits, and Limitations
With development of AI technology, healthcare chatbot is utilized in many areas, such as health education, treatment assistance, and office work. However, previous studies were only concentrated on particular disease or function, lacking a systematic review regarding chatbot’s role, limitation, effect on users in healthcare area.
This study has research on healthcare chatbot’s role, main users, potential, and limitation. Main research results were divided into two parts: offer of online healthcare service, such as mental care support, counseling and treatment advising, and chronic disease self-management and monitoring etc. The other is support to administrative work of clinicians. Main users were composed of various population groups, having almost every member of population group.
Advantages of Healthcare Chatbots
Advantage of healthcare chatbot is improvement of general health and reinforcement to the self-management, followed by increased accessibility. Moreover, it lead to the less work pressure on administrative work of clinicians, leading to saving time and cost.
Limitations of Healthcare Chatbots
Despite these benefits, healthcare chatbots present several important limitations. Its main limitations are as below:
User overconfidence and excessive reliance
Usability and accessibility issues
Technical limitations in language understanding and empathic capability
Concerns regarding the accuracy and safety of medical information
Legal, regulatory, and liability uncertainties
Privacy protection and ethical concerns
Potential exacerbation of inequalities due to the digital divide
These limitations suggest that although AI technology is developing exponentially, its use on medical field is still in grey zone of law and ethnical value, leading to requirement of time people to adjust to this new “AI era”.
