A Chatbot-based assistive technology to get information on a clinical environment

Healthcare is crucial for our society. Nowadays ICT has revealed the potential of improving efficiency and lowering costs. Chatbots interact with humans to answer questions, provide information and suggestions, and even in more complex tasks, such as assisting clinicians in performing diagnoses. However, despite their steadily increasing importance, only very few chatbots are created with inclusivity in mind, in order to be easily exploited by anyone, regardless of abilities. In this study, we propose a chatbot-based assistive technology for providing usable content with immediate short and focused answers. The basic idea that has driven the chatbot design was to provide an assistive technology capable of giving immediate and very short answers in a simple and accessible way especially for users who are not so familiar with digital content or for those who use screen readers and similar technology. Such information is certainly available on the web, but reaching it may not be easy for everyone. The proposed assistive chatbot technology is designed to make a contribution in this direction. The prototype has been specialized for Pisa hospital contents. A preliminary pilot test with ten users showed the feasibility of the proposed approach.