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PFEIFER: I'm Laura Pfeifer.
I'm a PhD student over at Northeastern University
in the College of Computer and Information Science.
My research, what I'm studying, is I really am interested
in computer interfaces that are specifically
designed for patients.
So my goal when I joined the PhD program was one thing,
and I wanted to help people.
And like, this... just... I just want to help people.
People need help and I know I can do something.
And specifically, I really want to help people in need.
So there are a lot of people out there who don't have access
to all of the stuff that I do, and I want to help them
in any way that I can.
So a lot of my time is split between... that's my office
in Computer Science, and that's Boston Medical Center.
So today I gave a talk to the girls about technology
in the field of health care, which is a really fascinating
field for me.
It's not something that I've been originally trained in,
but it's a huge field and it's one that needs...
you know, has the opportunity for a lot of technological
improvements, so hopefully, I got the girls thinking
about that and a career in technology and what they
could bring to the picture.
My first job when I got to Northeastern,
which was about four and a half years ago, was to start
creating a virtual nurse.
What?
And this was a project that we had going on over at
Boston Medical Center where they wanted to help streamline
their discharge their process and they wanted a virtual person
to be able to teach the discharge instructions
to people before they left the hospital.
So we spent a ton of time observing...
this is an actual nurse who worked at Boston Medical Center,
and this is a little discharge booklet that they give patients.
And we followed them around for months,
researching what they were doing, how they would explain
this document, when they would point to things,
when they would circle things with their hand,
what gestures they used, what verbal cues they would use
to talk to patients, and we wanted to go from something
like this to something that looked like this.
It looked like a person, it could use all the same
verbal and non-verbal cues to talk to patients
before they left the hospital.
So about two years after that started, we have a mobile cart
that wheels up to the patient's bedside,
and it's not really a nurse.
I'll tell you a dirty, little secret.
It's not really a virtual nurse.
It can't care for patients in the same way we think of
nursing, it can't give them medications,
it can't even hold their hand or do anything like that,
but it can teach them a lot of stuff and it can explain things
in a very slow and nice and easy way.
So this nurse uses a voice, so it can talk to them
and it can use a non-verbal gestures just like
us humans do when we point out things to people.
So I talked to a lot of patients about this.
I was really concerned that patients were going to
freak out and say, "Where is my doctor?
"I really want to talk to my doctor,
not this stupid computer."
And much to my surprise, they loved it-- really loved it--
and they really liked that in a hectic health care
environment like the hospital ward, they could have this
really personalized time.
They could take as much time as they needed to go over things
again and again, they didn't feel stupid asking questions
because they knew it was just a dumb computer,
it wasn't going to harsh... be harsh on them
if they didn't understand something.
So that was really, really encouraging for me.
And then the really exciting thing was that this technology
actually went to Washington, D.C. on a little
tablet computer, and this woman in blue, her name is
Carolyn Clancy and she's the head of all research
at the Health Care Research, Ambulatory Safety
and Quality Division of the National Institutes of Health.
And this woman in red, you might recognize her.
She's the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So this was really fun for me to be able to show this to people
in Washington, look at the research that I was working on,
and have something really get out there
and really make a difference.
Well, if you can say that you helped someone
just make their life even a little bit better,
it's great; it's what motivates me and it's what drives me.
It's what keeps me up at night, so it's been a great experience.
GIRL: Exactly how much can the virtual nurse do?
PFEIFER: So her main goal is to explain this booklet
that's given to patients.
They're given a really personalized booklet
before they go home, and the vast majority of what she does
is explains their medications that they were prescribed.
So a lot of the patients... I was really surprised,
but some patients that leave the hospital are on
over 30 different medications, and it's really complicated
to remember them and know what they all do and how they work
and what you have to look out for.
So she can explain over 6,000 different medications
and several different conditions that a person might have;
the reason why they were in the hospital.
So anyone could come in and talk to it and go over
their discharge procedures.
That's what she primarily does.
MORGAN: Hi, I'm Morgan.
I'm from Assabet Valley.
I was wondering, because I go to a technical school,
do you see the virtual nurse being in the nursing program
for teaching the students how to work with it,
and do you see in the future actual nursing being, like,
the job just disappearing because the technology
became so advanced that they actually
had the nurses not needed?
Like, they could think the same way as a human nurse?
PFEIFER: For your last question, I doubt it.
I really, really doubt it.
So there's a lot of things that technology can do
to help the nurses.
So when I talked to nurses over at Boston Medical Center,
a lot of them really wish that they could spend
an hour of time with each patient before they go home,
but they just can't because they don't have the amount
of resources and time, and this allows them to know
that that's getting explained and they can work
on other things like making sure that their medications
are being dispensed properly and everything's working
with their heart and all of these things that computers
just cannot do yet and it's going to be a really long time
before they... before they can.
So there are programs right now that do work with doctors
and nurses, so if you're a medical student
and you're getting trained on how to be a doctor
and how to interact with patients,
we have virtual humans that will pretend to be a patient.
They'll walk in and say, "Ooh, my stomach hurts;
I'm not feeling very good."
And the doctors in charge of... or the medical student
is then learning how to diagnose the problem
with these virtual students.
LEISHA: Hi, my name is Leisha.
I'm from the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.
In terms of the virtual nurse programming,
I'm interested in how it works.
And you said it works with speech.
I'm curious about your thinking about how it works
with deaf patients who can't hear.
PFEIFER: So I was just at a conference in Philadelphia,
and these are a group of people who are working on
virtual humans, and in particular, there's a group
in France who's working on automated signing,
and virtual humans who can take, in this case it was the French
language, as input-- just text.
You type in something in French, and then it... the output
would be a virtual human who was signing and singing accurately
in French sign language with the correct gestures
and hand movements.
And it's a really tricky artificial
intelligence problem.
We humans are really good at being able to work with
language and emotion and incorporate everything
properly, but it's not just as easy as typing it into
a computer and having it work.
So it's a really hard problem, and a lot of people
are very, very interested in solving it.
You know, I say go for it.
I mean, I say anything that they want to do or try,
just not to be scared.
I know it can seem really intimidating,
it can look really scary.
It's this box that does magical things and it can be hard
to understand, but it's really not scary.
Anybody can do it, and it opens up such a huge variety
of opportunities for girls.
You can really apply those skills in any sort of field,
whether it's, you know, theoretical computing
or whether it's ocean sciences, it... it can...
so much can be done with a degree in computer science.