Eastern Hospital is testing an AI-powered robot to help training patients with mild cognitive impairment, with therapists describing that as "a helpful assistant".

The hospital’s occupational therapists have compiled a database of about 400 questions, covering key cognitive domains and input it into the robot, which is able to communicate with people in Cantonese.

During training sessions, the robot randomly posts questions from the database. Patients can answer by talking to the robot, and they must get each of the questions right before moving on.

The robot will provide hints if patients struggle with a question repeatedly and adjust the difficulty level for subsequent questions.

“It will be a very good encouragement for the patients to continue their cognitive training. Because many of the patients, if they face several failures, they may just idle the training sections away,” says senior occupational therapist Thomas Cheung.

“And this situation is very common when we use the traditional one-way computer-aided training. For AI, it can eliminate these kinds of limitations.”

These robot-assisted sessions are typically about 20 minutes shorter than traditional face-to-face sessions, and patients who improve quickly can even do the sessions without a therapist.

But Cheung stressed that while this helps free up some staff time, it doesn’t mean human therapists can be replaced.

“We can say this AI robot facilitates the patient's participation in training but I don't think AI robots will replace human therapists. For this AI robot it still has to depend on the input from the therapist in programming and provide different situations for this system to learn,” he said.

The hospital currently deploys one AI-powered robot to work with a select group of geriatric and psychiatric patients.

It said it’s working on expanding the AI database and upgrading the hardware to improve the robot’s conversation skills and response time before wider use.