Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

Neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDD) are a group of conditions including learning difficulty, intellectual disability and autism. NDD affects 16% of Canadian and is frequently associated with disabling challenging behaviours such as aggression toward others, self-injury and not following requests. In a 2017 survey, individuals with NDD, their families and health professionals reported a lack of information about the best interventions. Indeed, it is still challenging to identify relevant and trusted information online for NDD and to keep updated. New advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of computer programs able to reproduce the way humans interact to ask questions and provide answers; these programs are known as chatbots. We therefore assembled a large multidisciplinary team including experts on NDD, parents and AI experts to build a chatbot that will allow families, health professionals and teachers to identify interventions and resources to help individuals with NDD experiencing challenging behaviours. We have developed a prototype chatbot named CAMI (Chatbot Assistant for Medical Information), which we will improve with information from families, educators and health professionals. The chatbot will also provide coaching to families and health professionals to allow them to be more independent in accessing and navigating the healthcare system. Using AI will allow the chatbot to take advantage of comments from users with similar profiles to make personalized recommendations based on what other users facing similar situations thought was useful to them. Together, our project will reduce the time spent online by parents and healthcare professionals, make quality information currently buried online more accessible and improve the proper utilization of the resources of the healthcare system using technologies already shown to be effective in the commercial sector.