NLP and Machine Learning in Health-- Designing a Chatbot for PTSD Assessment.

While working on the Omdena PTSD challenge, as part of the company's AI for Good initiative, it quickly became clear to us that there are many challenges unique to the field of medicine that make it harder for chatbots to be implemented and generate value. However, through the power of community collaboration, we identified the most promising direction with great results. The scope of our chatbot depended on the ML and other challenge teams- after all, a chatbot is just a vehicle through which certain processes are sped-up and automated. After thoughtful discussions and investigations of the available data, which turned out to be very sparse (due to openness, privacy, etc.), we agreed on focusing our efforts on assisting professionals in screening refugees, veterans and other groups at high risk of PTSD and assessing the likelihood of an medical assistance being needed. Build a chatbot that will, through a conversation with people at risk, provide sufficient information for the Machine Learning team to make a PTSD risk assessment.