Amazon Echo, second from right, and other Alexa-enabled products
Orbita, a developer of care coordination technologies for home health, is trying to make personal voice assistants — think Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the new Google Assistant — more user-friendly and relevant to healthcare.
The Boston-based startup this week released Voice Experience Designer, a visual designer tool for home health providers to customize voice assistants. The initial release is for the Alexa-powered Amazon Echo, and in the Amazon parlance, Voice Experience Designer helps create new “skills” for the Echo.
Orbita unveiled the product at the Connected Health Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “We opened up a developer ecosystem,” Orbita President and Chief Operating Officer Nathan Treloar said.
At MedCity ENGAGE in October, Treloar called voice the “universal remote control.” This tool is meant to harness that power.
“Our attitude toward these things is that they are the future,” Treloar told MedCity News Thursday.
Voice assistants are “very compelling devices,” he said. But, while Echo and its brethren are good at recognizing words, they often struggle to put words into context, and context matters in healthcare.
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“We are looking to create connected care experiences,” Treloar told MedCity news Thursday. “We are not prescriptive about the kind of connectivity,” he added, noting that a smartphone could be just as effective as a digital assistant or a wearable.
In the case of Alexa and the Echo, though, Voice Experience Designer is adding two additional elements for developers: an intelligence engine and an enhanced user experience.
Of the intelligence engine is meant to add context to data points collected from end users. “The last thing doctors need is more data. What they need is insights,” Treloar said.
The intelligence engine also could serve up content and guidance to patients, he added.
For example, a patient might say, “I’m in pain.” Alexa, backed by Orbita software, The system would respond with, “What is your pain level?”
The person might then say, “It’s 7,” which the Orbita system logs. “The 7 is a data point,” Treloar said.
In the future, Alexa — or any other similar platform Orbita might build on — could enhance what Treloar described as a “prescribed cognitive experience” with specific reminders to the patient.
When pain is high, the system might say that the patient has a prescription for OxyContin, tell the user that it’s OK to take up to 100 milligrams a day and then ask if the person has taken a pill today. All such directions would be controlled by the care provider’s protocols, and nurse care managers could follow up by phone.
Photo: Amazon
