![]() In her month-long pilot with the facility, she exchanged over 12,000 text messages with 34 Saint Elizabeth employees. To provide caregivers with appropriate coping mechanisms, Tess first needed to learn about their emotional needs. ![]() They might be in charge of, for example, organizing rides to appointments, making sure their spouse is safe when they run out to get their medications, clearing snow from the wheelchair ramp and checking their spouse does not fall while going to the bathroom at night. Caregivers often juggle their duties with their careers and personal responsibilities. And there’s no doubt that many need support, given the high rates of distress, anger and depression. But they are challenged at accepting care or asking for help,” says Mary Lou Ackerman, vice president of innovation with Saint Elizabeth Health Care. “Caregivers are really great at providing care. This is the first Canadian health care organization to partner with Tess and the first time that Tess is being trained to work with caregivers specifically. A Canadian non-profit that primarily delivers health care to people in their own homes, Saint Elizabeth recently approved Tess as a part of its caregiver in the workplace program and will be offering the chatbot as a free service for staffers. It was precisely that potential that caught the attention of Saint Elizabeth Health Care. After working at IBM – where he worked with state-of-the-art AI – Rauws had his “aha” moment: if he could create a chatbot smart enough to think like a therapist and able to hold its own in a conversation, he could help thousands of people at once and relieve some of the wait times for mental health care. It became clear to him that lots of people wanted help but, for a number of reasons, couldn’t access it. In learning to manage his depression, he found himself able to coach friends and family who were going through their own difficulties. Rauws’s own struggles with chronic illness as a teenager brought on a depression that led him to seek help from a psychologist. The company’s mission is to use AI to provide affordable and on-demand mental health support. She’s the brainchild of Michiel Rauws, the founder of X2 AI, an artificial-intelligence startup in Silicon Valley. If you’re experiencing a panic attack in the middle of the day or want to vent or need to talk things out before going to sleep, you can connect with her through an instant-messaging app, such as Facebook Messenger (or, if you don’t have an internet connection, just text a phone number), and Tess will reply immediately. But those resources aren’t always immediately accessible to caregivers, and the system can be backlogged, depending on the area where a patient lives. ![]() ![]() For those in the middle of their careers who can’t afford to quit, government-funded programs that provide caregivers help from nurses and personal support workers become increasingly important. Many caregivers say they don’t have money to hire private care or a support network. The country has an ageing demographic and an increasing number of long-stay home-care patients, so the number of older people in Canada who could need the assistance of caregivers, informal and professional, is growing. As of 2012, according to Statistics Canada, over 8 million Canadians provided care to a chronically ill or disabled friend or loved one.
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