Baidu Technology Corporation, an Internet leader based in Zhongguancun Science Park, recently developed a medical robot which can diagnose patients through voice inquiry and response. It marks the company's application of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine.
Users only need to say their symptoms, such as joint pain, red eyes, or coughs, and the robot will give diagnosis and medical suggestions immediately. The robot can also connect patients with medical professionals nearby.
The project, named "Ask A Doctor," is one of Baidu's major achievements in voice recognition and AI after the participation of Wu Enda, a specialist in AI.
With the development of AI, more tech leaders are entering the medical science industry. Earlier this week, IBM announced that it would acquire Merge Health, a medical imaging company, and upload statistics from the company to its supercomputer. Although it has not officially announced a medical project, Google is planning to enter the industry. Baidu has advantages in size, with a base of tens of millions of Chinese netizens and Baidu users.
The company is a global leader in voice technology. A team of around 40 researchers has worked on a manual nerve system to deal with Mandarin Chinese since February. With such technology, the machines will have more computing ability to deal with complicated languages.
"Ask A Doctor" is able to diagnose 520 common diseases after accessing the huge amount of user statistics. The product covers more than 90 percent of common medical questions nationwide. The desktop version of the product has been released, and the mobile version will launch soon.
Baidu hopes to connect to medical records, which are in the preliminary stages of digitalization. The product is a new step in the company's online to offline business in medicine. In the future, it will serve as a bridge between users and doctors.
