Aiming to empower the Region with AI, Singapore planning to launch A new center to answer a few common issues and improve healthcare. Their first focus are:
- To help newcomer workers train and develop. With the help by AI, hospitality workers are expected to do self-learning and for research purposes easier than before. For example, workers can use several prompts to do quick research about detailed information for any diseases
- With the help of AI which can provide any data quickly either historical or assist in finding the newest data from the internet, hospitality workers are expected to detect any potential for a disease to become an endemic or even pandemic-scale disease.
- To provide several solutions for facing and also managing massive diseases like COVID-19. With a wealth of data from AI, they're expecting to develop several treatment plans.
IMAGINE AI, The global Healthcare and AI Conference
On December 5th to 8th, the National University Hospital Singapore held a biannual conference called IMAGINE AI. This event is a global healthcare and AI conference held in Singapore. This organised by Singapore’s medical clusters and academic institutions at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre.
Attracting over 600 delegates from around the world to discuss the latest trends and innovations, the conference's main highlight was the demonstration of MiSSi, a nurse robot designed to assist with hospitality tasks.
Although the prototypes were recently released, plans are already in place to deploy 13 of these robots following the establishment of a new AI center.
MiSSi, AI-Powered Robots
Head of the academic informatics office at NUHS, Professor Ngiam Kee Yuan, says what sets the 1.5-meter-tall robot apart from others is its AI capabilities. Powered by an AI model developed by NUHS, ‘Missi’ can interact with nurses and patients, monitor vital signs, deliver medicine, and provide information such as:
- Giving advised dosage of medication
- how to store different kind of medications
- Tell about the medication’s intended effects
Despite potential worries from patients, Professor Ngiam also reassured patients by explaining the robots will always be watched by real nurses during the test run. The robots will listen to the nurses and follow orders from a main control center.
Champ, The WhatsApp Bot
Besides the AI robot, NUHS has also introduced another innovation called 'Champ' The WhatsApp bot that helps hospitality workers by reminding them to update patient data, which in turn assists the AI robots. Since its launch, 'Champ' has already collected data from a significant number of enrolled patients, aiming to reach a target of 150,000.
However, in realizing those plans, the use of AI in serious fields such as hospitality still has a big problem caused by the use of Singlish, which is a Singapore local dialect.
Singapore Local Dialect, Singlish
Singlish itself is a mixture of various languages and dialects that reflects Singapore's cultural diversity. Singlish probably started exists after Singapore became independent in 1965. Back then, the government decided to make English the main language.
Because the native people of Singapore are Malay, in general, some locals have an issue and struggle to fully master the English grammar. That's why local people sometimes mix Malay and English in communicating today.
The Reason Why Singlish Become a Problem
The primary challenge is most global AI models struggle to fully comprehend Singlish, a dialect characterized by unique accents and vocabulary. Subtle differences in word meanings can lead to misinterpretations of prompts.
Local developers agree that teaching AI to understand Singlish – as well as a long list of medical terms – has taken heaps of data.
To realize the NUHS plans, the researchers currently working to input a huge amount of data to train the AI. This data included over 300,000 call logs and information from the National Speech Corpus, a large database of Singaporean English. This database helps developers create better speech recognition tools.
