LA Hospital Testing Alexa For ‘Patient-Centered’ Voice Assistant Platform

The Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles has started a new pilot program which puts an Alexa-powered platform called Aiva in more than 100 patient rooms. The platform enables patients to interact with the nurses hands-free and also control their entertainment. The hospital says that Aiva is the “world’s first patient-centered voice assistant platform for hospitals.”

This pilot project has patient rooms equipped with Amazon Echo speakers. Patients can just tell the device what they require. If they want to turn the TV on and off or change the channel, they can do that by giving verbal commands just like they would at home to an Alexa device.

A patient who requires assistance can say something like “Alexa, tell my nurse I need to get up to use the restroom.” Patients’ requests are routed to the mobile device of an appropriate caregiver such as a nurse or clinical partner. A request for pain medicine would be routed to a registered nurse while a bathroom request would go to a clinical partner.

If a request is not answered in a timely fashion the Aiva platform will send it up the chain of command. In addition to these patient-centric features, the Echo devices at Cedars-Sinai also offer all standard Alexa features so they can use the digital assistant just like they would at home.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Alexa, Amazon Echo