Chatbot for Palliative Care Caregiver (GES 4)

The objective of this work is to develop and implement a chatbot aimed at the informal caregiver of patients in GES 4 (Explicit Health Guarantees), to be used by health centers, companies, or institutions that provide support to caregivers. The chatbot uses natural language processing (NLP) tools, particularly word-embeddings, to process user queries. Among all the options for developing the chatbot, SBERT was selected as be the best option for performing sentence embeddings. These embeddings are used to make the machine process the incoming queries, going from a natural language to one understood by the computer. Then, in conjunction with a palliative care expert, a database of frequently asked questions and their answers was created and integrated into the algorithm. The chatbot was evaluated by an expert in the field five times to check the correct functioning of the chatbot for questions written correctly, with spelling errors and using non-existent words. In all cases, consistent answers to the questions asked by the user were obtained. The chatbot allows continuous and direct communication 24 h a day between the health center and the patient.