SEATTLE — A Seattle company is hoping that artificial intelligence can help people dealing with memory issues and early dementia.
The company, NewDays, is using an AI chatbot named ‘Sunny’ paired with telehealth sessions with real humans to treat people with cognitive decline.
Tanna Jean Pidgeon, who goes by TJ, started using NewDays this summer.
It was in late 2023 that TJ’s family noticed a change in her.
“The kids would be like ‘she’s at dinner and she’s not even talking,’” daughter Andrea said. “It’s like, what’s going on? Is she there?”
TJ, 81, began seeing a neurologist at Overlake, then added NewDays. She uses it daily for about 30 minutes.
“She’s more intuitive and she’s more talkative,” Andrea said. “I feel like she’s getting better.”
TJ is an active grandmother and great-grandmother, as well as the proud owner of a dog named Ginger.
She says she mostly talks to Sunny about how she’s feeling, and talks about her dog.
NewDays Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Kelly and co-founder Babak Parviz are former engineers and leaders at Google X and Amazon Grand Challenges.
Parviz founded and led Grand Challenges and the Google Glass team.
Both know a great deal about setting big goals for tech. Both also have family histories of Alzheimer’s.
“The goal is not to have an AI companion,” Kelly said. “It’s to use this tool to practice the conversational skills that you need to continue to interact with real people in your day-to-day life.”
Kelly says patients like TJ meet with a cognitive therapist online regularly, which he says is covered by Medicare.
Sunny is not covered by insurance. The full use of the chatbot, with prescribed exercises and discussions about happy memories, is $99 a month.
“So really the conversations with Sunny are just an extension of working with the cognitive therapist,” Kelly said.
NewDays licensed the methodology from a clinical trial out of Harvard.
It found that regular, semi-structured conversations with human interviewers online helped older adults with mild cognitive impairment.
“How do you know it works the same way when it’s an AI chatbot?” reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.
Kelly said that NewDays can’t make any of the claims that the Harvard study does, but while they follow the methodology, “we will do our own clinical trials to see if we can duplicate the same results.”
But there are growing concerns about humans forming unhealthy attachments to AI chatbots.
So, how does NewDays keep it safe?
“It’s a combination of a lot of testing that we do of the system, simulating a wide variety of topics that can come up in the conversations and making sure that our system is behaving the way we expect it to,” Kelly said.
“Medical AI is transforming healthcare right now,” Dr. Su-In Lee, UW Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, said. Lee runs the AIMS lab (AI for bioMedical Sciences) at UW, known for its work in pioneering explainable AI. She’s the only woman to win what’s referred to as “the Korean Nobel Prize” in engineering.
“There are two sides,” said Dr. Lee when KIRO 7 asked for her opinion on NewDays. “My first reaction: I immediately saw the promise.”
But Dr. Lee has words of caution, too.
“The potential danger of overtrusting medical AI is the other side of my feeling,” she said.
Dr. Lee and her team uncovered medical AI systems taking shortcuts in detecting COVID-19 in chest radiographs— an action that led to failed diagnoses.
“Bottom line is that these models are not transparent,” she said. “The goal of explainable AI is enhancing the interpretability of AI models to help humans understand why AI systems give you a certain outcome.”
Dr. Lee pointed out that AI can hallucinate. She emphasized the importance of updating AI models continually, conducting clinical trials, and auditing.
“Error analysis is really important,” she said. “Let’s say that there is no improvement, then what do we do? Right?… So identifying the failure modes, and then revealing the reasons for this failure.”
Andrea Pidgeon describes her mother’s experience with NewDays as “nothing but amazing.”
She said it’s an assurance that her mother is exercising her brain even on days when she can’t be there.
“It gives me a breath of fresh air... knowing that she can log in from the family room or the couch or her bed or whatever and talk to Sunny.”
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