Northeastern's RECOVER Uses GPT-4o to Monitor Cancer Patients at Home
A voice-based chatbot plus clinician dashboard uses chain-of-thought prompting to cover 94% of postoperative check-in questions with zero hallucinations across 200 samples.
PRO- RECOVER pairs a GPT-4o Alexa voice bot with a clinician dashboard for postoperative GI cancer monitoring (paper).
- Chain-of-thought prompting raised symptom coverage from 56% to 93.93% on GPT-4o, and to 98.75% on Claude 3.7 Haiku.
- Zero assessment errors, hallucinations, or misunderstandings across 200 sampled conversation turns from 15 real patients.
- System Usability Scale scored 93.75 with clinicians and 85 with patients, beating phone calls and questionnaires.
- Design came from 7 participatory sessions with clinicians who rejected traffic-light color coding in favor of priority-based colors.
- OpenAI runs on HIPAA-compliant Azure; full prompts are published but no public code repository (DOI).
Postoperative gastrointestinal cancer patients live in a dangerous window. GI cancer causes roughly 3.4 million deaths per year worldwide, and 5-year survival rates fall below 30% in many cases after surgery. Complications like sepsis or anastomotic leakage can appear suddenly at home, but the tools clinicians use to monitor recovery (phone calls, patient portals, long questionnaires) either exhaust patients or drown providers in unstructured data. A team from Northeastern, Johns Hopkins, MedStar, and UC Irvine built RECOVER, an LLM-powered remote monitoring system, to test whether GPT-4o can close that gap without introducing new safety risks.
Two interfaces, one language model
RECOVER splits the workload between patients and providers. Patients talk to an Alexa Echo Dot each day, activating the skill with "Alexa, Open Recover Bot," while clinical staff review results through a web dashboard that shows symptom severity with color-coded dots and LLM-generated summaries. The backend runs on Flask with PostgreSQL, and the OpenAI service is hosted on Azure under a HIPAA-compliant configuration that keeps conversation logs out of third-party hands.
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