How Good is Artificial Intelligence at Automatically Answering Consumer Questions Related to Alzheimer's Disease?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of AI models in automatically answering consumer questions about Alzheimer's Disease, aiming to support caregivers and improve access to relevant information.

Contribution

It introduces the first application and assessment of AI models specifically designed to answer Alzheimer's-related consumer questions.

Findings

AI models can generate relevant answers to AD questions

Potential to assist caregivers by providing timely information

Highlights challenges and future directions in AI for health questions

Abstract

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, comprising 60-80% of cases. There were an estimated 5.8 million Americans living with Alzheimer's dementia in 2019, and this number will almost double every 20 years. The total lifetime cost of care for someone with dementia is estimated to be $350,174 in 2018, 70% of which is associated with family-provided care. Most family caregivers face emotional, financial and physical difficulties. As a medium to relieve this burden, online communities in social media websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and Yahoo! Answers provide potential venues for caregivers to search relevant questions and answers, or post questions and seek answers from other members. However, there are often a limited number of relevant questions and responses to search from, and posted questions are rarely answered immediately. Due to recent advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), we propose to utilize AI to automatically generate answers to AD-related consumer questions posted by caregivers and evaluate how good AI is at answering those questions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in the literature applying and evaluating AI models designed to automatically answer consumer questions related to AD.