Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) refers to a group of disorders characterized by delays in the development of socialization and communication skills. In 2013, researchers found that diagnosis of PDD which include:
- Autism
- Asperger Syndrome
- Childhood Disintegrative Disorder
- Rett Syndrome
- Not Otherwise Specified
Parents of children with atypical development can feel quite stressed and confused when the child is in the nascent stage. They may have a lot of questions in their mind regarding symptoms, screening, and treatment options, etc. Similarly, when faced with the diagnosis of ASD, parents can easily be overwhelmed by the news and may have a lot of questions regarding causes, and child’s future, etc. In such difficult times, finding answers on search engines like Google, despite them being the de-facto places to get answers to all queries, can be very frustrating since the information is spread across different web pages. No single web source can provide the answers to all queries. In addition, with misinformation being rampant these days, checking the authenticity of information on web pages is next to impossible.
In this project, we have introduced a medical domain-specific chatbot system, which can answer frequently asked queries related to ASD by gathering and summarizing information from various authentic web sources. Moreover, it provides other useful features including the ‘M-CHAT Screening test’ and ‘Special Needs Learning Facilities Nearby’ to aid parents of autistic children. We have leveraged the natural language processing capabilities provided by Google’s Dialogflow service to develop the chatbot and have later deployed it on Google Assistant, one of the most popular and widely used messaging services, to provide easy and quick access to users.
For more details refer to Report.
Refer to Appendix C (Installation & User Guide) in Report.
| Full Name | Work Items (Who Did What) | Email ID |
|---|---|---|
| Apar Garg | Web scraping, Find Special Needs Learning Facilities Nearby fulfillment, Heroku deployment, Report and documentation | apargarg99@gmail.com |
| Gopan Ravikumar Girija | Web scraping, M-CHAT screening fulfillment, Google Assistant integration, Report and documentation, Video presentation | rggopan123@gmail.com |
| Yeong Wee Ping | Web scraping, Knowledge base FAQ, Overall chatbot workflow integration, Google Assistant integration, Report and documentation | aceirus@hotmail.com |
- Add 'Appointment Booking' functionality. After looking for the nearest treatment facility, the bot will automatically book an appointment for the user (if user wants to) and send the confirmation via mail.
- Predicting autism traits (screening) based on contextual information such as age, gender, ethnicity and family history etc. Dataset | Code
- Combine bot with a web-camera/home-cctv. The webcam can auto detect risk factor (answers to the M-Chat questions), thus carry out "active-survey", compared with current "passive-survey".
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