Amazon brings Alexa to hospitals and senior living homes
Amazon has already been targeting venues such as hotels and residential complexes to deploy its Alexa voice assistant. But for now the company has announced new solutions for healthcare providers and senior living facilities.
The solutions, which are part of Alexa Smart Properties, are designed specifically to meet the needs of large-scale deployments of Alexa devices and allow facility administrators to create custom capabilities for their residents or patients.
“We believe that the intuitive and accessible nature of voice and Alexa can help and delight customers in many scenarios, both at home and beyond. We are excited to extend the experience customers already love to senior communities and healthcare systems, and to give providers new ways to save time and deliver personalized care to their patients and residents”
In senior living communities, residents will be able to use Alexa devices to call family members and other loved ones, and stay informed about their community and other news. The devices can be used for announcements, allowing residents to communicate with each other through direct audio messages and make voice and video calls, and they can also simplify other facility tasks such as check-ins, maintenance requests and various administrative duties. Amazon believes this will help make facilities more efficient and productive.
The market for using Alexa in senior communities is already being explored by third-party providers such as K4Connect, which raised $21 million in funding last year. The startup offers new technologies, including Alexa voice assistance, to older adults and people living with disabilities. Companies such as K4Connect and others, notably Lifeline Senior Living, Aiva and Vocera, can now use Alexa Smart Properties tools and APIs to more easily deploy their own custom solutions and software.
Meanwhile, Amazon has already tested installing Alexa in patient rooms with Cedars-Sinai (a medical center in Los Angeles), allowing patients to use voice commands to perform basic tasks such as switching TV channels, as well as to communicate with caregivers. The idea was that by offloading some everyday tasks to Alexa, nurses could focus more on medical care.
With Amazon's new solution for hospitals, patients will be able to use Alexa to communicate with medical staff, control devices in their room, and enjoy news and music. Medical workers can also communicate with their patients using Alexa features such as calling and Drop-In, without having to enter the rooms. This may also help hospitals work more productively and save medical supplies and protective equipment such as gloves, masks and gowns, which is important during a pandemic.
In some places, a shortage of personal protective equipment remains a persistent problem as the coronavirus pandemic surges in waves. Amazon said Cedars-Sinai is among those officially deploying the Alexa Smart Properties solution after a pilot program, and BayCare and Houston Methodist have joined them.
“Voice is intuitive for patients regardless of age or technical savviness. Because it is so easy to use, patients can use Alexa to contact their care team and entertain themselves as soon as they are settled, while healthcare providers can streamline tasks to spend more time caring for these patients. This will be a real game changer in our hospital”
Although Amazon has struggled with privacy concerns related to the use of voice recordings and transcriptions, the solutions for medical facilities and senior living centers do not store voice recordings and do not require users to share personal information with Alexa to use the device. Users can also turn off the Echo microphone at any time using the button on top. Amazon says it protects medical information obtained through interaction with Alexa skills that comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
Amazon has been working on using Alexa in medical facilities for some time. A CNBC report from 2018 said the company was building a healthcare team within Alexa to make the voice assistant useful in this industry. The task included working through the complex HIPAA rules that would be required for this.
As early as 2019, Amazon announced its first HIPAA-compliant health skills and began pilot testing its devices in hospitals. In other divisions, Amazon has invested in healthcare solutions in other ways, notably with Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that extracts information from things like doctors' notes and patient medical histories, as well as acquisitions such as the online pharmacy PillPack.
The company said both Alexa Smart Properties solutions will be deployed in the US as early as November 2021.
