A healthcare chatbot for medical appointments and medication reminders

Abstract

Hospitals are places where the sick go to receive medical care but in Uganda, it is difficult to access medical care services due to the long waiting times endured before receiving medical care or due to high prices charged by private health centres for medical care. After patients have received medication, there is an up to 60% probability that they will not adhere to the prescribed medication and this is most common among patients suffering from chronic diseases (Lam and Fresco, 2015).The main objective of this study was to solve these two challenges through the development of a healthcare chatbot that allows patients to make appointments to hospitals so that they do not spend hours at the hospital waiting to see the doctor. The application also allows users to set reminders for when they have to take their medication after it has been prescribed by a healthcare provider.The application provides a number of functions to the user and these were defined based on results obtained from data collection and analysis. System design diagrams were also drawn to depict the data requirements and processes of the application and these were based on to implement the physical mobile application.