The Chatty Cathys

Inspiration

One of the most pressing issues Johns Hopkins Medicine representatives shared in their pitch presentation is that many patients have difficulty navigating the video visit technology that providers have increasingly relied on during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially true for underserved patients who have “low health literacy, low-tech literacy, or limited English proficiency.” We, the Chatty Cathys, came together to use our lived experiences and knowledge on health disparities in underserved populations to develop a platform that served as a more accessible site.

What it does

Chatty Cathy creates an user-friendly platform for those with low health literacy, low-tech literacy, or limited English proficiency. Our platform ultimately hopes to prepare underserved patient populations for their telemedicine visit, and shift the technological burden off of healthcare providers in helping patients access their telehealth services. Since accessibility informed a large part of Chatty Cathy’s design, we implemented key features such as larger font sizes and sensitive colors for the visually impaired, multiple language support, and mobile-browser compatibility. We also modeled the chatbot to answer common questions about COVID-19.

How we built it

We used HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Google Cloud Dialogflow API, and Botcopy to build our website. Additionally, we relied on research papers and reputable sites for factual background information to inform our proposed solutions.

Challenges we ran into

One of our first initial challenges was figuring out how to model a chatbot and determining which services to use to help us bring that vision to reality(Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform/Dialogflow, etc.). We ultimately chose Google Dialogflow because of its advanced natural language understanding capabilities. We also had difficulty figuring out how to connect a chatbot with a website platform.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all were unfamiliar with Google Cloud and what it has to offer, but after working together, we’ve familiarized ourselves with the platform. Additionally, we were able to take advantage of the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of the team members to solve a problem we were all passionate about.

What we learned

What's next for The Chatty Cathys

We are hoping and working to use Sendgrid to synchronize our chat bot to SMS and email for even wider-use among those with low tech proficiency. We would want to expand our list of languages. As of right now, we only offer English and Spanish; however, we want to cater towards as many languages with accurate translations. Our team has proficient Arabic and Bengali speakers and we hope to recruit other college students who are proficient in other languages. Lastly, we currently have the chat-bot ask the user if they want to save their symptoms for storage in a diary-like platform, but we hope to interface this information with a physician so that they have a record of a patient’s symptoms from real-time.