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Electronic health record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted across healthcare organizations. While there are many benefits of using EHR such as improved accessibility and secure sharing of patient data, a shortcoming is that its manual data input is time-consuming and error prone. Physicians spend as much as 49.2% of their office time on EHR. In this paper, we present the design, development, and evaluation of a voice-based assistant, DocPal, to assist healthcare practitioners to access and update EHR through their voice. User survey and experimental evaluation illustrate that DocPal has good usability, time efficiency, and accuracy. When applied in the healthcare industry, we expect it to reduce data entry time and provide better patient care. 

Background The world’s aging population is increasing, with an expected increase in the prevalence of Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD). Proper nutrition and good eating behavior show promise for preventing and slowing the progression of ADRD and consequently improving patients with ADRD’s health status and quality of life. Most ADRD care is provided by informal caregivers, so assisting caregivers to manage patients with ADRD’s diet is important. Objective This study aims to design, develop, and test an artificial intelligence–powered voice assistant to help informal caregivers manage the daily diet of patients with ADRD and learn food and nutrition-related knowledge. Methods The voice assistant is being implemented in several steps: construction of a comprehensive knowledge base with ontologies that define ADRD diet care and user profiles, and is extended with external knowledge graphs; management of conversation between users and the voice assistant; personalized ADRD diet services provided through a semantics-based knowledge graph search and reasoning engine; and system evaluation in use cases with additional qualitative evaluations. Results A prototype voice assistant was evaluated in the lab using various use cases. Preliminary qualitative test results demonstrate reasonable rates of dialogue success and recommendation correctness. Conclusions The voice assistant provides a natural, interactive interface for users, and it does not require the user to have a technical background, which may facilitate senior caregivers’ use in their daily care tasks. This study suggests the feasibility of using the intelligent voice assistant to help caregivers manage patients with ADRD’s diet. 

Although social media and contents are being generated and shared with an unprecedented scale and speed, rural and underdeveloped areas throughout the world have only limited access due to the lack of high-speed Internet. Connecting rural communities to the digital world and providing them with right contents will provide the much-needed bridge between urban and rural areas. In this paper, we propose a communication and information framework that utilizes simple Internet of Things (IoT) in a rural community to assist delay-tolerant content distribution. Specifically, a hybrid fog-cloud content distribution network is constructed by deploying low-end simple fog nodes and utilizing the movement of community vehicles. Moreover, drones are used to distribute content on demand as a compliment of the delay tolerant network for better delivery rate and lower delay time. A novel drone scheduling algorithm is proposed to plan drones’ tours optimally. Extensive simulation experiments have been performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework.