MANUS AI Solved My Pharmaceutical Problem Just In Time!

Software
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This time, my problem was more than a academic exercise, my health was on the line !

Backstory:
The small rural town I live in in Northern NSW has had many problems in the last few years, from cyclones to major floods and our economy like so many others has been badly damaged.

For me, one major issue is my local GP and prescription renewal.

I had a major stroke at age 35 in 1989 and have been on a cocktail of drugs ever since, which necessitate obtaining prescription medication from a chemist every month. I guess I’ve been thru this process 420 times now and spent about $13000 dollars on medications alone.

I normally get a few repeats for each prescription from my doctor, and these have all run out now, (because the last 4 times I have tried, I have have not been able to make an appointment with him because the medical centre has been closed or offline or he was on holidays.

Yesterday I only had one tablet of one medication remaining, and it’s a critical drug for me!

I phoned my local GP centre to book a consult for new prescriptions with my current doctor, but they were so busy they didn’t take my call and after 5 minutes on hold they auto terminated my connection with a ‘please try again later’ …

I logged online and saw that of the four GP’s available, three had waiting times of weeks and only one had a free appointment slot … and that was next Monday at 1:30 pm, which was too far away for me. My regular GP wasn’t even listed.

So I phoned the NSW govt ‘healthline’ and spoke to a engaging and helpful nurse so gave me the contact details for a online health care provider who she thought would bulk bill, but she wasn’t sure. I’m between old age pension payments at the moment (as Im 70 years old) and have had a lot of expensive bills this month so really needed a provider who bulk bills like my regular GP.

A Singapore female voice answered my call at the above health provider and informed they don’t bulk bill and the cost would be $55, which doesn’t work for me right now.

So I was in a right pickle, I could Google and swim thru a morass of on-line health providers and adverts looking for one that advertised bulk billing etc but I knew it would be a frustrating waste of time.

Then I remembered I still had 900 credits with Manus AI, and isn’t it designed exactly for this kind of task ?

I quickly set to composing the right question:

The Manus Prompt
Search on-line medical providers in NSW who bulk bill old age pensioners with a health care concession card and who are new patients to the provider. The provider must have telehealth appointments available today or tomorrow and they must be able to send a e-prescription to my phone.

In about 2 minutes of activity Manus AI had located a provider (Abbyhealth care in Sydney) who met all the criteria, and supplied me with apointment times available that day, the contact details, the website URL, everything!

The URL for AbbyHealth is https://www.abbyhealth.app/ for anyone who is interested.

I made a online appointment, a very helpful Dr phoned me within a hour and sent a e-prescription to my phone as we chatted.

As I was filling out the obligatory online medical and medication history, it was obvious to me that an AI was controlling the session from the way it asked for more data to certain answers and recovered easily from my typing blunders.

I soon had my e-prescription and had ordered it for home delivery from my chemist via my cellphone using Android App “MedAdvisor”. :slight_smile:

Total cost was zero, as they bulk bill. No fuss, no stress. Major health disaster averted!

And all in the nick-of-time.

If the reader is young, bright eyed and in perfect health, and who types at 100 W.P.M. you’ll probably be muttering ‘whats the big deal, I could do this easily all by myself ?’ but please bear in mind that I’m 70+ years old, and really need the assistance of a AI to resolve this kind of problems these days.

AI isn’t fake or a joke or media buzz, it really works to resolve tedious and complex problems exactly like this one.

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Very impressive Terry. I am surprised that such a service existed but admittedly it’s a couple of years since I had to think about such things.

I am also surprised that it was entirely free (even the Manus credits were free, at least at this stage). :wink:

Speaking of strokes I was wondering if anyone has experience or knowledge of aids available for stroke patients. The information I am after is more in the technical than the medical field.

A mate of mine had a severe stroke two years ago. This has rendered him bed bound and essentially immobile on his left side. He has completed rehab but is really only able to talk; so answering a phone and listening to the radio is fine. He struggles with television. His speech and mental capacities are minimally affected, if at all.

The issue is that with this type of stroke he cannot see the left side of his world and more particularly he is unaware of things on his left side a phenomenon known as left sided inattention. This renders his unable to read a book or a screen and the same applies to writing. His text is scrambled and often not decipherable.

Essentially what he needs is an interface that does text to speech and vice versa. In the era of modern AIs / LLMs is there anything that would be functional for him?

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Hi David,
I can imagine the frustration that your friend must experience having gone thru the loss of functions for a time with my own stroke !

Books:
I can only think of using a computer or MP3 player to play audiobooks for him, as they have been made for most books. They exist in MP3 format and I use them myself.

I’m currently listening to a audiobook of Vernor Vinges award winning SCIFI book named “zones of thought”.

Text to speech and vice versa:
These exist now for people with disabilities and sound somewhat Borg like. For speech they need to be trained to suit the user. They can be operated by a mouth switch and are built around small boards like the Raspberry Pi.

People can use them to control electric wheelchairs by voice right now.

Raspberry Pi Speech-to-Text (from a AI)

Raspberry Pi can be used for speech-to-text processing both online and offline. For offline speech-to-text, Mozilla DeepSpeech is a popular choice that works well on Raspberry Pi 4 without requiring an internet connection.

Another option for offline speech-to-text is the SOPARE (SOund PAttern REcognition) software, which is Python-based and designed for Raspberry Pi.
 It can process real-time audio offline and is capable of recognizing sounds and words in different languages.

For online speech-to-text, the spchcat tool is available and can be used on a Raspberry Pi to turn audio into text.
 It requires a recent version of Raspberry Pi OS and a microphone to function properly.

Additionally, the article "Real-time Speech-to-text on Raspberry Pi and Python" discusses using the speech_recognition library with OpenAI Whisper for real-time speech-to-text, though this method involves sending requests to an online service.

Here are some tools and methods for speech-to-text on Raspberry Pi:

Mozilla DeepSpeech: An offline speech-to-text engine suitable for Raspberry Pi 4.
SOPARE: A Python-based sound pattern recognition software for Raspberry Pi, capable of offline real-time audio processing.
spchcat: A command-line tool that can turn audio into text on Raspberry Pi, requiring a microphone and recent Raspberry Pi OS.
speech_recognition: A library that supports OpenAI Whisper for real-time speech-to-text, though it involves online requests.
These tools provide various options for implementing speech-to-text functionality on a Raspberry Pi, catering to both offline and online requirements.

I imagine it won’t be long before small but superior AI systems replace them, but I have no knowledge of such systems at this time.

Terry