Disha: An Implementation of Machine Learning Based Bangla Healthcare Chatbot

While humans as a whole do live longer nowadays than ever before, we now suffer certain illnesses to a degree never seen in the past - including rising rates of Diabetes, Hypertension, Hypotension, Cholesterol imbalance, obesity and, ailments such as fever. People around the world are preemptively seeking medical advices on how to live a healthy lifestyle. They are looking to lower their risk of various diseases. A healthcare chatbot can play a significant role to monitor a person's health status. A healthcare chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users as a virtual medical assistant. Our study shows, there are some healthcare chatbots available in English and other languages but not in Bangla. In this paper, we have demonstrated a machine learning-based closed domain Bangla healthcare chatbot `Disha (Direction)' which can converse in Bangla with the user with the help of its knowledge base and through learning from interactions with the user. It helps a user to diagnose potential diseases based on inputted symptoms, keep track of a user's health status, and alert a user from potential health hazards. This paper explores the use of six supervised machine learning approaches and showed significant efficiency.