National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) on Thursday presented its newly developed telecare system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the occurrence of patient-related emergency events by analyzing text conversations between patients and their live-in caregivers.
The “Intelligent Voice Emergency Prediction System of the Fourth-Generation Real-Time Synchronous Telehealth Care Platform” developed by NTUH and Chunghwa Telecom won the “21st National Innovation Award-Clinical Innovation Award” in November last year.
At a news conference, Ho Yi-lwun (何奕倫), director of the Department of Internal Medicine and Telecare Center at NTUH, said the system converts conversations between patients and caregivers into text, and could analyze keywords in conversations, such as blood pressure and other physiological data, for earlier predictions for emergency treatment, thereby reducing unnecessary complications in patient care.
Photo: Chiu Chih-jou, Taipei Times
Taking people with acute myocardial infarction as an example, Ho said if intervention occurs within the golden six hours for treatment, there is a chance occluded blood vessels could be recanalized.
The intelligent voice emergency prediction system could accurately identify people with emergency needs, distinguish between high and low-risk patients, and allow those with greatest need to receive necessary treatment quicker, he added.
This system would not only help reduce emergency room visit rates, but also the length of hospital stays and the risk of death, due to immediate medical responses, Ho added.
Hung Chi-sheng (洪啟盛), a doctor from NTUH’s Telehealth Center, said that since its establishment in August 2009, the Telecare Center has handled 540,000 phone calls and cared for more than 7,000 patients.
It cooperated with Chunghwa Telecom to introduce the telecom’s multi-language, medical speech recognition technology and conduct AI model training, which could recognize speech in Mandarin, English and Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), Mandarin accents of migrant caregivers, medical terms, Chinese and English names of drugs, and convert the speech into text.
Through language processing and analysis of integrated nursing records, the AI system could monitor and predict the probability of people experiencing emergency events within two weeks of analysis, Hung said.
The system’s predictive accuracy rate is roughly 90 percent, he said.
Telecare could improve patients’ blood pressure, reduce mortality, reduce emergency room visits, and the number and length of hospital stays, Hung added.
Home-based telecare has become an important tool to address healthcare needs in Taiwan’s aging society, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS