An AI-powered Public Health Automated Kiosk System for Personalized Care: An Experimental Pilot Study

Background: The HERMES Kiosk (Healthcare Enhanced Recommendations through Artificial Intelligence & Expertise System) is designed to provide personalized Over-the-Counter (OTC) medication recommendations, addressing the limitations of traditional health kiosks. It integrates an advanced GAMENet model enhanced with Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Multi-Head Cross-Attention (MHCA) while ensuring user privacy through federated learning. This paper outlines the conceptual design and architecture of HERMES, with a focus on deployment in high-traffic public areas. Methods: HERMES analyzes self-reported symptoms and anonymized medical histories using AI algorithms to generate context-aware OTC medication recommendations. The system was initially trained using Electronic Health Records (EHR) from the MIMIC-III dataset (6,350 patients) and Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI) data from the TWOSIDES database, incorporating the top 90 severity DDI types. Real-time DDI checks and ATC-mapped drug codes further improve safety. The kiosk is designed for accessibility, offering multilingual support, large fonts, voice commands, and Braille compatibility. A built-in health education library promotes preventive care and health literacy. A survey was conducted among 10 medical professionals to evaluate its potential applications in medicine. Results: Preliminary results show that the enhanced GAMENet model achieved a Precision-Recall AUC (PRAUC) of 0.74, outperforming the original model. These findings suggest a strong potential for delivering accurate and secure healthcare recommendations in public settings. Conclusion: HERMES demonstrates how AI-driven, privacy-preserving kiosks can enhance public health access, empower users, and alleviate burdens on healthcare systems. Future work will focus on real-world deployment, usability testing, and scalability for broader adoption.