Robot Helps Patients Manage Chronic Illness: Move over, Alexa and Siri: talking Mabu provides one-to-one support while relaying information to doctors.

• Author: Winn, Zach
• Position: MEDICINE & HEALTH

THE MABU ROBOT, with its small yellow body and friendly expression, serves, literally, as the face of the care management startup Catalia Health. The most-innovative part of the company's solution, however, lies behind Mabu's large blue eyes.

Catalia Health's software incorporates expertise in psychology, artificial intelligence, and medical treatment plans to help patients manage their chronic conditions. The result is a sophisticated robot companion that uses daily conversations to give patients tips, medication reminders, and information on their condition while relaying relevant data to care providers. The information exchange also can take place on patients' mobile phones.

"Ultimately, what we're building are care management programs to help patients in particular disease states," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus Cory Kidd, Catalia Health's founder and CEO. "A lot of that is getting information back to the people providing care. We're helping them scale up their efforts to interact with every patient more frequently."

Heart failure patients first brought Mabu into their homes in early 2018 as part of a partnership with the health care provider Kaiser Permanente, who pays for the service. Since then, Catalia Health also has partnered with health care systems and pharmaceutical companies to help patients dealing with conditions that include rheumatoid arthritis and kidney cancer.

Treatment plans for chronic diseases can be challenging for patients to manage consistently, and many people do not follow them as prescribed. Kidd says Mabu's daily conversations not only help patients, but human caregivers as they make treatment decisions using data collected by their robot counterpart.

Kidd was a student and faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology before coming to MIT for his master's degree in 2001. His work focused on addressing problems in health care caused by an aging population and an increase in the number of people managing chronic diseases. "The way we deliver health care doesn't scale to the needs we have, so I was looking for technologies that might help with that," he explains.

Many studies have found that communicating with someone in person, as opposed to over the phone or online, makes that person appear more trustworthy, engaging, and likable. At MIT, Kidd conducted studies aimed at understanding if those findings translated to robots. "What I found was when we used an interactive robot that you...