Chatbots in Healthcare: Challenges, Technologies and Applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been around for more than fifty years. However, current improvements in processing power, the accessibility of huge amounts of data, and improved algorithms have led to significant advancements in AI. A chatbot is a software program with AI that simulates user interactions. Healthcare chatbots gradually eliminate hospital wait times, appointments, and consultation meetups, thus instantly assisting patients in connecting with the right doctor. Chatbots reduce the workload of healthcare providers by decreasing the number of hospital visits and unnecessary treatments, providing suggestions and alerts. However, the introduction of such chatbots in the healthcare domain exposes users to a plethora of challenges. This paper presents a systematic survey of recent developments by researchers in the field of healthcare chatbots. This research brings to light general information regarding the application type, various technologies and evaluation methods that have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of healthcare chatbots and aims to serve as a research guideline which may be valuable for the development of chatbots in various fields.