Que Xopa!

A first-aid/health chatbot integrated into WhatsApp that assists blue-collar workers in Latin America with injuries that occur at work. 

WhatsApp has about 275 million active users in Latin America, the majority of these users are blue-collar workers or low-income earners. This user base is uneducated due to socio-economic factors. The Inter-American Development Bank's (IDB) analysis of the 2009 PISA results ranked the 63 countries with the greatest improvements when compared to previous PISA results; Panama ranked 62nd. Additionally, Panama has some of the lowest graduation rates in Latin America, at 43% for high school and 61% for middle school. This data tells us that not only is Panama one of the countries with the lowest graduation rates across the board, but there are little signs of improvement for the future. A poor educational background results in an impaired ability to make informed decisions, as they lack the critical thinking skills necessary to filter information and make decisions.

 Blue-collar workers are subject to a variety of injuries and illnesses that may occur as a result of their work. Some common first-aid/health-related injuries include musculoskeletal injuries, cuts, scrapes, bruises, burns, exposure to hazardous materials, heat stroke and heat exhaustion, noise-induced hearing loss, and respiratory issues. There are several reasons why blue-collar workers may avoid treating their injuries in the workplace; including being afraid that if they report an injury, they may be seen as less productive and fear that they would be viewed as weak or unable to perform their duties. They also tend to be paid hourly, which means that they have to wait until their shift is over to seek medical attention. By that time, the minor injury sustained may have snowballed into a more serious problem, like an infection. Our goal is to assist blue-collar workers to make quick informed first-aid/health-related decisions by providing a first-aid/health chatbot that is integrated into WhatsApp, which is the preferred method of communication used by blue-collar workers. 

Our solution is an AI Natural Language Processing-driven bot that provides users with an easy and fast way to get the help they need. Our solution uses the WhatsApp Business API framework and is integrated with Dialog Flow, a very robust language parser to translate end-user text during a conversation to structured data that our service can understand and respond to. 

Users will have the first-aid/health chatbot’s number saved on their phones, and just like texting their friends on WhatsApp, they can chat with the first-aid/health bot to ask FAQs about common injuries in the workplace when they need to. When the user messages the first-aid/health chatbot, they will receive a greeting and will be asked if they require immediate emergency medical attention. If so, the bot will automatically call 911 and also show the user the option to contact local hospitals around the user’s vicinity.  

If not, the user will be asked to select what category their medical emergency falls into. The topics that the users can select are bleeding, electric shock, poison, allergies, heart attacks, seizures, burns, and scalds, choking, drowning, or strokes. Once the user selects the topic, they will be asked several yes-or-no questions to diagnose their medical condition. After that, the bot will provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to treat the injury. Additionally, the user will be provided with a video sourced from verified medical sources about the medical condition in under eight minutes. Next, the user will be asked if they fully understand the step-by-step process of how to treat the injury. If the user is unsatisfied, the bot will present them with the emergency numbers of the local hospitals around their vicinity. Finally, the user will receive a “Thank-you” message and have the option to leave feedback on the service.

Our innovation targets blue-collar workers who typically perform jobs that require physical labor. Examples of blue-collar workers include construction workers, electricians, etc… In Panama, blue-collar workers are usually migrant workers who earn a minimum wage. Panama is an appealing country to work as a blue-collar worker because of its relative closeness to other Latin American countries and the currency circulated is the American dollar (USD). Since workers are paid in dollars, they often generate more income in Panama when compared to their home country. These workers save money from their jobs to help out other members of their families, especially those families who are in underdeveloped or developing countries. 

Adequate medical care in Panama for lower-income communities ranges from $15 to $50 and specialists' care ranges from $50 to $100. When an injury happens, blue-collar workers are typically faced with the dilemma of choosing to save money over prioritizing their health. Most of the time injuries that happen in the workplace are left untreated by blue-collar workers because they do not know how to use the available first aid kits or access health recovery-related information. Our initial target audience will be the housemaids and construction workers that work at our school. Our innovation can be easily spread by word of mouth because the user does not have to be the customer. The injured blue-collar worker can ask someone else to use the step-by-step localized guide in the first-aid/ health chatbot to treat the injury. Our hope is that as blue-collar workers use our innovation, they will recognize its benefits and share it with the community that they are a part of. This should help us to expand into the lower-income areas of Panama City and eventually help us to spread to other countries in Latin America.

Felipe enjoys getting to know blue-collar workers and is committed to finding ways to improve their lives. This led him to come up with the idea to create a WhatsApp first-aid/health bot that will help the lives of blue-collar workers. Felipe took on the role of the team manager, who supports the other team members and is also in charge of applying to innovation competitions. To bring this idea to life, Felipe recruited Kaiqi who uses the programming skills that he acquired from competing in VEX Robotics tournaments to lead the development of the WhatsApp bot. The third member of the team is Qingqing who is responsible for researching, curating, and updating information from reliable sources which are used by our WhatsApp bot. This makes our team the perfect balance of skills, talents, and experiences that guarantees our project’s success and differentiates us from other teams. 

To interact with our user base and validate our solution, we conducted interviews with members of our target audience and the medical community. Both groups confirmed that our innovation has the potential to provide stellar benefits to blue-collar workers in Panama and that our innovation will enhance the quality and efficiency of first-aid care and the response to widespread public health emergencies. Members of the medical industry pointed out the need for referrals for newly established private clinics as they struggle to find patients. This inspired us to explore how we could implement a peer-to-peer review system for the emergency services that we recommend inside the chatbot. This feature will help our target audience connect with trustworthy doctors who will provide quality and affordable health care. Furthermore, our team leader (Felipe) went to a public school (with grades ranging from preschool to 8th grade) to teach 7th-grade students some English phrases as part of a volunteer and community service project. He witnessed firsthand the reality of public Panamanian education, where the only technological resources available to students are their phones and a copier machine that the teacher uses to make copies of worksheets for all her students. This experience was eye-opening because it highlighted the potential for underserved communities to have access to medical information through existing technology like WhatsApp. 

While there are several websites that include a chatbot embedded on a website that provides information related to first aid on the internet, they are ineffective as they require an extra step for users to use a browser and then use a search engine to find them. By integrating a chatbot into WhatsApp (which is the most commonly used messaging service in Latin America), blue-collar workers will have easy access to information on how to perform first aid and use first aid kits that are provided by their employer. Additionally, most of the information provided is in English. The language barrier for non-English speakers contributes to the effectiveness of our innovation, as people who are non-native English speakers will be able to understand the first-aid/health-related information provided as we have options for both English and Spanish. 

It is difficult to copy our work because of the complexity of the code involved and the integration between different cloud applications and APIs in the development of our chatbot. Adding on, our innovation has the potential to help mitigate the spread of epidemics and pandemics. Notable examples over the past 20 years include Ebola, H1N1, swine flu, influenza, and most notably, COVID-19. A critical part of mitigating the spread of such contagious diseases is the spread of reliable health information. The innovation has the potential to advance health informatics, as our team has the required coding and research skills to update the code of our chatbot and add relevant information from sources such as the World Health Organization (WHO) website on how to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases.

Our project has a different approach, as we use WhatsApp to streamline information for blue-collar workers so that they can address their injuries in a timely manner. Our innovative approach to health informatics promises to be more effective because our chatbot is easy-to-use, doesn’t require another app to be installed, and delivers first-aid/health-related information in their native language. The best part is that there is no need to create an account or sign up, and it's free to use. Since our chatbot is associated with a phone number in WhatsApp it can be easily shared with other users as a contact card. The biggest advantage that our chatbot possesses, is its integration into WhatsApp, an app that all blue-collar workers already use. 

Currently, an area for growth in our approach is distribution. We anticipate that getting the chatbot's phone number into the phones of blue-collar workers will be our biggest obstacle. However, we believe that as we roll out a high-quality first-aid/health chatbot that fulfills its promise of positively impacting the lives of blue-collar workers, more and more blue-collar workers will begin to use it as they see its benefit.

Considering the subpar education system in Panama and current literacy rates, our impact goal is to improve the accessibility of the chatbot by adding voice messages to make it inclusive to all blue-collar workers. This will be added to the extensive list of information already provided by the chatbot, such as step-by-step guides, further comprehension questions, and a link to quick and useful YouTube videos for users to take care of their injuries. By including voice messages, users will be able to comprehend the content more easily as they can follow along with the audio, even if their reading level is not up to par.

Our second impact goal for the year is to increase the list of injuries for blue-collar workers to tend to. This will be done by interviewing workers in different industries in the blue-collar community and asking them about their health and the frequent injuries that they suffer that are not listed on our database.

Our third goal for the year is to connect eager, recently graduated, and affordable doctors with blue-collar workers for more affordable consults. To achieve this goal, we plan on creating a referral list of suitable doctors to treat the injuries listed in our database. We believe that by implementing these goals, we can make a positive impact on the health and safety of blue-collar workers in our community by providing quality medical care at affordable rates. 

When we looked into how to create an AI bot that could extract people’s demands and find the perfect solution based on their needs, the first thing that we thought of was using APIs. APIs are mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. Search engines such as Google use advanced APIs to help people find the information they require. Our goal is to use the same concept but uses WhatsApp and create a strong database by using APIs to extract the exact information the user requires and send it to the user.

As the base of our solution, we use WhatsApp Business API which is an application program interface that allows businesses to receive and answer unlimited WhatsApp messages seamlessly. After doing research, we found that compared with any other applications, WhatsApp is the most used application by people of all social statuses. It is a website that everyone could use every day easily. Creating a bot in WhatsApp could allow people to access it easily and know how to use it. To help people understand the processed language a bit better, we use DialogFlow which is a natural language understanding module that understands the nuances of human language. DialogFlow translates end-user text or audio during a conversation to structured data that your apps and services can understand. The biggest advantage of using an agent like Dialog Flow is that it handles concurrent conversations with our end users. Using Dialog Flow could allow users to receive specific customized messages that they could understand easily and help them achieve the most effective first-aid help.

When the user is in an emergency medical situation, our location APIs together with our strong database will help the user communicate with the nearest emergency hospitals. In our database, we have already compiled all the locations, emergency numbers, location guides, and all emergency contact information of every possible clinic and hospital that could be found in Panama City. When the user confirms the location, the bot will use location APIs to help the user to find all the nearby hospitals and clinics so that they can get in contact directly with the clinic.

Currently, our team is finishing our prototype. When we do, it will be launched to an initial reference crowd of 100 people. They will have a 7-day trial to use our chatbot and provide feedback on its usability, features, and functionalities. Upon receiving that feedback, our team will make the necessary adjustments and officially launch it. According to the Cámara de Comercio, Industrias, and Agricultura de Panama (CCIAP), the union of construction workers and similar industries has around 40,000 members. Therefore, in our first year, we plan to serve 30,000 workers. Union members would account for 20,000 workers, and the other 10,000 users will be introduced to the chatbot through word of mouth of union members and our marketing efforts in Panama City. Additionally, in our second year, we plan to exponentially increase our user base by expanding our reach to non-union members, areas outside Panama City, and blue-collar unions in other countries. By focusing on union members in our first year and expanding our user base outside of unions in subsequent years, we believe that our chatbot will be well-positioned to revolutionize access to first-aid health care and information in Latin America. 

Cultural: As we are students, we find difficulty in prioritizing tasks that are most important and allocating time accordingly. We also tend to struggle with procrastination, putting off important tasks until the last minute, which can lead to stress and poor performance at times. At times, we also tend to take on too many responsibilities or commitments, which can also lead to burnout and poor performance.

Technical: Currently WhatsApp has not released a public API for building bots on their platform, making it difficult for our developer to access the necessary tools and resources to further develop our first-aid/health bot.

Market: Our marketing strategy is based on word of mouth and this puts us at a disadvantage as it might take time to penetrate the market.

Legal: As a service that uses bots, we collect and use personal data. Hence, we must comply with relevant privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and find a way to obtain consent from our users before collecting their data.

We are currently partnering with the administrators at the International School of Panama, and we are planning to beta test our solution with the blue-collar workers (construction workers, security guards, and cafeteria staff) that are employed by the school. After successful beta-testing, we plan to roll out to the blue-collar workers in Panama.

As a non-profit organization and a cloud-first service, our start-up and maintenance costs are designed intentionally to be very low. The infrastructure needed for the WhatsApp bot to function seamlessly is hosted in the cloud. This significantly reduces our initial and operating costs. The operating costs include $120/month for hosting the WhatsApp bot service; $10/month for the SIM card; and $60/year for the website domain and hosting. The total cost incurred to successfully keep our first-aid/health chatbot up and running for a year would be approximately $1620.

There are multiple ways to generate income and meet the operating costs to sustain the innovation. When using our chatbot in case of an emergency, the user selects a specific area of Panama, and our built-in location API asks the user for permission to assist them in finding nearby hospitals to help them with the emergency. Our team can extract this data and use it to make a business deal with local private hospitals, where they will provide us with a commission for every referral. Once we have a strong user base, we will also be able to partner with first-aid companies in Panama to create a joint venture where we will license our innovation so that first-aid companies will have a boosted online presence when the targeted audience uses our innovation.  

While there are a lot of possibilities to generate revenue including using the chatbot service to drive lead generation the chatbot can also be programmed with a call-to-action to encourage users to sign up for a free trial, book a demo, or make a purchase. We are not looking forward to implementing such revenue-generating streams in our innovation as we would like to keep our platform ad-free for our users.

As a non-profit organization, we plan to start the innovation with minimal outside funding by using our own personal resources (bootstrapping). As we transition into year 2, we will use the income that is generated from the innovation to pay for the operational expenses which are about $1620. To keep the innovation up and running, we will try different avenues to raise funding if enough income is not generated to meet the maintenance costs. Our team believes that word of mouth is the best way to not only market our innovation but also to seek new investors. One such way is to spread the word about our innovation by participating in global innovation and entrepreneurship competitions. We intend to use the prize money to invest back into our innovation and double down on our marketing efforts to get our innovation to each and every blue-collar worker in Panama.