Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Digital Healthcare

Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 4: Real-World AI Service & Socket.IO

Updated: January 18th, 2023 – changed info from Microsoft LUIS to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services / Conversational Language Understanding. 

In this last part, we bring the vital sign checklist to life. Artificial Intelligence interprets assessments spoken in natural language. It extracts the relevant information and manages an up-to-date, browser-based checklist. Real-time communication is handled through Web Sockets with Socket.IO.

The example scenario focuses on a vital signs checklist in a hospital. The same concept applies to countless other use cases.

In this article, we’ll query the Microsoft Azure Conversational Language Understanding Service from a Node.js backend. The results are communicated to the client through Socket.IO.

Connecting Language Understanding to Node.js

In the previous article, we verified that our language understanding service works fine. Now, it’s time to connect all components. The aim is to query our model endpoint from our Node.js backend.

Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Digital Healthcare

Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 3: Conversational Language Understanding Service

Updated: December 12th, 2022 – changed info from Microsoft LUIS to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services / Conversational Language Understanding. 

Training Artificial Intelligence to perform real-life tasks has been painful. The latest AI services now offer more accessible user interfaces. These require little knowledge about machine learning. The Microsoft Azure Conversational Language Understanding Service performs an amazing task: interpreting natural language sentences and extracting relevant parts. You only need to provide 5+ sample sentences per scenario.

In this article series, we’re creating a sample app that interprets assessments from vital signs checks in hospitals. It filters out relevant information like the measured temperature or pupillary response. Yet, it’s easy to extend the scenario to any other area.

Language Understanding

After creating the backend service and the client user interface in the first two parts, we now start setting up the actual language understanding service. I’m using the Conversational Language Understanding service from Microsoft, which is based on the Cognitive Services of Microsoft Azure.

Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Digital Healthcare

Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 2: Node.js Backend & User Interface

Updated: December 12th, 2022 – changed info from Microsoft LUIS to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services / Conversational Language Understanding. 

The vision: automatic checklists, filled out by simply listening to users explaining what they observe. The architecture of the sample app is based on a lightweight architecture: HTML5, Node.js & the Microsoft Conversational Language Understanding Cognitive service in the cloud.

Such an app would be incredibly useful in a hospital, where nurses need to perform and log countless vital sign checks with patients every day.

In part 1 of the article, I’ve explained the overall architecture of the service. In this part, we get hands-on and start implementing the Node.js-based backend. It will ultimately handle all the central messaging. It communicates both with the client user interface running in a browser, as well as the Microsoft LUIS language understanding service in the Azure Cloud.

Creating the Node Backend

Node.js is a great fit for such a service. It’s easy to setup and uses JavaScript for development. Also, the code runs locally for development, allowing rapid testing. But it’s easy to deploy it to a dedicated server or the cloud later.

I’m using the latest version of Node.js LTS (currently version 18) and the free Visual Studio Code IDE for editing the script files.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR

Augmented Reality Christmas Tree with Google ARCore Developer Preview 2 – in 5 Minutes

We don’t have a Christmas tree in our apartment. But in today’s world, this is what Augmented Reality is for, right? Therefore, I decided to create an AR Christmas Tree in 5 minutes. This also gave me an opportunity to check out the new Google ARCore Developer Preview 2.

Christmas Tree 3D Model

First off, you need a 3D model of a Christmas tree. Two of the most accessible sources are Google Poly and Microsoft Remix 3D. Sticking to models created directly by Google and Microsoft, these two are the choices:

Christmas Tree by Poly by Google
Christmas Tree by Poly by Google
Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Digital Healthcare

Using Natural Language Understanding, Part 1: Introduction & Architecture

Updated: December 12th, 2022 – changed info from Microsoft LUIS to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services / Conversational Language Understanding. 

During the last few years, cognitive services have become immensely powerful. Especially interesting is natural language understanding. Using the latest tools, training the computer to understand spoken sentences and to extract information is reduced to a matter of minutes. We as humans no longer need to learn how to speak with a computer; it simply understands us.

I’ll show you how to use the Conversational Language Understanding Cognitive Service from Microsoft. The aim is to build an automated checklist for nurses working at hospitals. Every morning, they record the vital sign of every patient. At the same time, they document the measurements on paper checklists.

With the new app developed in this article, the process is much easier. While checking the vital signs, nurses usually talk to the patients about their assessments. The “Vital Signs Checklist” app filters out the relevant data (e.g., the temperature or the pupillary response) and marks it in a checklist. Nurses no longer have to pick up a pen to manually record the information.

The Result: Vital Signs Checklist

In this article, we’ll create a simple app that uses the conversational language understanding APIs of the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. The service extracts the relevant data from freely written or spoken assessments.

Categories
Android App Development AR / VR Digital Healthcare

Real-Time Light Estimation with Google ARCore

ARCore has an excellent feature – light estimation. The ARCore SDK estimates the global lighting, which you can use as input for your own shaders to make the virtual objects fit in better with the captured real world. In this article, I’m taking a closer look at how the light estimation works in the current ARCore preview SDK.

Note: this article is based on the ARCore developer preview 1. Some details changed in the developer preview 2 – although the generic process is still similar.