Diverse Data, Healthier Futures

For Dr. Kari Inda, it all began with a desire to create a better patient experience. As an occupational therapist working with older adults, Inda encountered what she described as a “wealth of lived experiences” that she saw rendered invisible within residential care settings.

Now the chair of Mount Mary University’s Occupational Therapy department, Inda credits this experience with helping her understand the importance of incorporating her patients’ unique personal backgrounds and cultures into creating personalized care plans designed to help them thrive. The idea has since made significant strides toward becoming reality, as a team of Mount Mary Occupational Therapy faculty and students created the Culturabot™ app. The technology helps medical care providers design customized patient care plans using artificial intelligence (AI) to gather multicultural data from scientifically reliable open sources.

This data includes culturally appropriate and plain language descriptions of care and ways to support access to healthcare services, allowing providers to gain valuable insights about their patients.

Expanding Inclusive Data Access

Throughout the development process, the team has effectively taught their bot to cultivate relent multiculturally appropriate data by “feeding” it with questions and prompts. Inda and her team are excited for the implications of reaching a wider cross section of people, an especially important consideration when delivering care to underserved populations such as African American, Latinx, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities. The team hopes this will ultimately create better, more collaborative and wider reaching healing outcomes.

“Culturally sensitive care has been shown to improve the therapeutic experience,” said Inda. “Understanding the background and needs of each patient is central to this.”

Inda described the process of working with emerging AI technology as both exciting and challenging. One of the biggest frustrations is what she described as “data limitations from a western point of view” and search algorithms making assumptions about what the researcher would find useful. Instead of viewing these situations as obstacles, however, Inda and her students were inspired to dig deeper. They approached the process with curiosity and creative problem solving, such as connecting with researchers abroad to weigh in on aspects of their research and push past the limitations of implicit bias.

To the Occupational Therapy chair, Mount Mary is well positioned to tackle this challenge. “We have a diverse wealth of knowledge here,” Inda said. “Many of our students come from communities where these disparities exist — why not use this knowledge to grow and become better informed and responsive in new ways?”

Envisioning a Bright Future

Now in its testing phase, the Culturabot™ app is anticipated to be ready for release in 2025. Mount Mary Occupational Therapy students are currently using the platform with their patients during onsite clinical rotations to learn about its evolving capabilities. Additionally, a Mount Mary UX Design team led by assistant professor Mary Burton is working to improve the app’s interface, ensuring an easy-to-use final product.

Support from Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the opportunity to scale the final product with the goal of making it available to a wider community of healthcare providers. The Mount Mary team is currently working with and seeking potential corporate, venture and non-profit partners to determine and develop future commercial possibilities for the app.

Inda and her team already envision wider implications for their product, with plans to expand to other healthcare fields beyond occupational therapy.

“There’s such a need for delivering accessible services to the patient,” reflected Inda, who shared her excitement for this unique opportunity. “I’m thinking bigger already.”

The project is connected to Mount Mary’s new Institute for the Advancement of Women and Children, announced by Dr. Isabelle Cherney in 2023. The Institute includes four centers for championing women’s health and wellness, women’s access and advancement in technology, children’s rights and women’s leadership. It seeks, among other goals, to improve quality of life indicators among historically marginalized and vulnerable populations.