Category: Education

The HealthBot project was born from a desire to address a critical challenge evident in many Greek island communities, including our own in Kos: the gap in accessible, preventative healthcare.
Motivated by this local need and inspired by a national student competition, our goal was to explore how technology could empower individuals to take a more proactive role in their well-being. This initiative was designed with a dual purpose: to create a tangible tool for health equity and to serve as a powerful, real-world case study for Project-Based Learning (PBL) in STEM.

The Solution: An AI-Powered Health Kiosk

At its core, HealthBot is an autonomous health kiosk that integrates a suite of sensors and artificial intelligence to provide immediate, non-diagnostic health insights. The system is designed to measure key parameters such as weight, height, and advanced biometric data, including heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), and respiration rate (RR), using a specialized MAX86150 biosensor.
Furthermore, it leverages AI in two significant ways: a cloud-based machine learning model (ModelDerm) offers preliminary analysis of skin lesions, and a Large Language Model (GPT-4 mini) synthesizes all the collected data to provide personalized, easy-to-understand wellness advice.

The Journey: Student Innovation in Action

This project was, first and foremost, an educational endeavor driven by a talented team of high school students from the Instudies center: Filippos Papanikolaou, Tasos Syris, and Giota Nikoloudaki. Over a six-month period, they drove the entire development process, from conceptual design to a functional prototype. Guided by the principles of PBL, they tackled significant technical hurdles that required remarkable ingenuity. This included not only the mechanical construction and hardware integration but also developing custom software from scratch to interface with the advanced MAX86150 biosensor, as no ready-made libraries were available for their platform.
We experimented with different materials and calibration algorithms to optimize the accuracy of the weight scale, demonstrating a deep, hands-on engagement with the engineering process.
This journey allowed them to cultivate crucial 21st-century skills in problem-solving, collaborative design, and system development.

Validation and Future Vision

The team’s work culminated in a public testing event in Kos, where 24 community volunteers provided valuable initial feedback.
The results from the NASA-TLX workload assessment were promising, indicating the kiosk was generally easy and not burdensome to use. The feedback also highlighted key areas for technical refinement, such as final sensor calibration, providing critical insights for the next development phase.

HealthBot stands as a proof-of-concept demonstrating that student-led innovation, when channeled through effective educational frameworks like PBL, can produce tangible technological solutions for real community needs. In recognition of its dual value in health technology and education, our paper detailing this project was accepted for presentation at the 14th Panhellenic Conference on ICT in Education. The future of this work lies in further technical validation and exploring sustainable pathways for deployment in the communities it was designed to serve.

One of the issues, viewed from a different perspective, that I found challenging while participating in the 2nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education organized by the Council of Europe, especially after the presentation by the senior advisor of the Norwegian Ministry of Education, concerns how a well-structured and organized approach in public administration can foster the advancement of formal education. Such an approach can drive the continuous evolution of methodologies and teaching content, which are often difficult to change due to the nature of educational systems, and act as a catalyst for improving education.

In the example of Norway, the education system is decentralized and operates on three levels: the level of educators, the local government level—which has a significant role in shaping the educational frameworks—and the higher government level, each with corresponding responsibilities.

It appears that in such a framework, smooth operation, implementation of educational frameworks, and the adoption of modern educational tools and programs are much easier. In contrast, in other European Union countries, such as Greece, where the educational structure is different—without intending to use harsh characterizations—even basic educational reforms or initiatives aimed at upgrading teaching methods and training educators face difficulties in implementation, let alone more complex changes in curricula and methodologies.

So, how could a European educational framework that, among other things, promotes equal opportunities in education and seeks to overcome geographic inequalities and socioeconomic differences, function in countries that struggle to support any positive change?

In formal education, how could the European level, beyond laying the foundation for improvements and providing tools, promote/support/propose the evaluation and set-up the systemic and organizational framework of education, especially concerning world-changing technologies like Artificial Intelligence? This would take into account the extremely high importance it has for the sustainability of the countries themselves and the people living there—especially the youth who grow up and live in these countries.

For those living in such countries, the reality is that efforts for change either face significant barriers or remain unimplemented, with negative consequences for citizens and their future. This inability, as mentioned, has a serious impact on the sustainability of an entire country, especially considering that education is the foundation for a sustainable future with prospects for something better.

In matters of education, I believe that non-formal education is also what can lead to necessary changes and serve as a guide toward a new educational model. This view is shared by innovation and development stakeholders in education from other European countries.