The recent popularity and success of Apple’s Watch in helping users manage health-related functions such as aFIB detection, heart rate monitoring, and fall detection has not gone unnoticed by other big tech giants.
Big tech companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and others are looking for ways to get a share of this lucrative market around personalized disease management.
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In this article, we will look at two key areas where Amazon is collaborating with researchers in order to position its technology to provide personalized health care management solutions.
Allow Alexa to Hypnotize you in 2020 and beyond?
The challenge around smoking cessation programs is not new. Different techniques and now medications are available in the market to help smokers kick the habit out.
Amazon is betting that smokers can use Alexa to get help with self-hypnosis and thereby get rid of the nasty habit.
In what appears to be a very interesting idea, Amazon has partnered up with Dr. David Spiegel from Stanford University and is executing a clinical trial focussed exactly on this.
The study team pre-records the intervention and programs it as an interactive hypnotic tool. Amazon’s Alexa device delivers the program.
The participants will be provided with the Alexa Dot device if they already do not possess one. What is unique about this pilot study is the interactive nature of the program developed using Amazon’s “skills beta testing tool.”
The results from the clinical trial were expected to be produced last year in September 2019. Apparently, the study is still not published as of June 2020.
Hypnosis is a very safe and validated mind-body technique for symptom management of various clinical problems.
If Alexa is able to successfully help users in smoking cessation programs, there could be many other opportunities such as weight management that it can successfully position its virtual assistant
Amazon Alexa as a wellness assistant for patients with heart Failure
Amazon is collaborating with the National Institutes of Health, Georgetown-Howard university, and Medstar Health research in understanding the efficacy of voice-based patient care outcomes.
The basic idea is that integrating data from virtual voice-activated assistants (Amazon Echo Dot with Alexa voice technology), with the rich medical history available in Electronic Health Records (EHR) allows for a truly customized, interactive, and automated personal healthcare assistant.
The Alexa+ Study, launched in 2018 and expected to complete in 2020 will compare the use of the Amazon Echo Dot with Alexa voice technology in patients with chronic heart failure to those receiving standard of care heart failure management on changes in health and patient-centered outcomes.
