- Livongo, a Mountain View, Calif.–based startup focused on managing chronic diseases, sells an Alexa-connected blood glucose monitor that can help diabetes patients track their condition.
- Home health care provider Libertana Home Health, based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., created an Alexa skill that lets elderly or frail residents connect with caregivers, sets up reminders about medications, reports their weight and blood pressure, and schedules appointments.
- Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles put Amazon devices loaded with a plug-in called Aiva into more than 100 rooms to connect patients with staff and to provide hands-free television controls. Unlike a static call button, the voice-controlled device can tell nurses why a patient needs help and can then tell the patient the status of their request.
- Boston Children’s Hospital, which offered the first Alexa health care software with an educational tool called Kids MD, now uses Alexa to share postsurgical recovery data between a patient’s home and the hospital.
Many medical technology companies are tantalized by the possibilities offered by Alexa and similar technologies for an aging population. A wearable device could transmit information about falls or an uneven gait. Alexa could potentially combat loneliness. It is learning how to make conversation.
“Alexa can couple a practical interaction around health care with an interaction that can engage the patient, even delight the patient,” said elder care advocate Laurie M. Orlov.
It and other voice assistants also might help bring some relief to doctors and other medical practitioners who commonly complain that entering medical information into EHRs is too time consuming and detracts from effective interactions with patients.
This technology could work in the background to take notes on doctor-patient meetings, even suggesting possible treatments. Several startup companies are working on such applications.
One such company is Suki, based in Redwood City, Calif., which bills itself as “Alexa for doctors.” Its artificial intelligence software listens in on interactions between doctors and patients to write up medical notes automatically.
Amazon devices will need to excel at conversational artificial intelligence, capable of relating an earlier phrase to a subsequent one, if it is to remain dominant in homes.
In a 2018 interview on Amazon’s corporate blog, Rohit Prasad, a company vice president who is head scientist for Amazon Alexa, described Alexa’s anticipated evolution using “federated learning” that lets algorithms make themselves smarter by incorporating input from a wide variety of sources.
“With these advances, we will see Alexa become more contextually aware in how she recognizes, understands and responds to requests from users,” Prasad said.
This Kaiser Health News story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation. KHN is a nonprofit national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.