eHealthAI - Skill Alexa - Voice Assistant for Health
Tags: devpost, hackathon, alexa, aws
Published: 2022-08-30 17:26:54

People of all ages want to be able to get personal assistance solutions from any device, anytime, anywhere. 

With age, people have specific needs and it is very common that, after 55 years of age, many of these issues have to do with health. 

Maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle and having an adequate quality of life means being as independent as possible. 

Increasingly more advanced ages are reached but there is a big difference between each person and each person has specific needs. 

Faced with this reality, artificial intelligence systems and, in this case, especially those based on voice technologies, can be of great help, support and contribution to allow middle-aged and elderly people an easier, independent, active and organized life. who find in skills like Alexa Health Question an ally in their day to day. 

Alexa Health Question (ehealthAI Voice Assistant for Health) is a simple Alexa skill developed in fully functional mode (but very limited and with merely demonstrative effects) for this “Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge: Aging & Engaging” competition on Devpost) . 

The system is based entirely on the example (https://github.com/InternetOfHealthcare/nursing-alexa-skill-workshop) and it has been used as it lays the foundations for developing and scaling a conversational system on health issues that both allow: 

Ask Alexa health-related questions 

Save health records in Alexa 

Maintain a calendar of medication to be taken and medical visits 

Request health recommendations from Alexa 

Subscribe and buy health solutions through the application. 

Etc. 

For the purposes of this competition, the skeleton, scheme and central structure of the example model have been maintained, since its scalability would correspond to more advanced bases of the development in question if it were to be commercialized, and for this reason this system is maintained. in its essential base but with two modifications and essential considerations: 

One of the features that can be incorporated is that for people who, for example, suffer from Alzheimer's and stop remembering their name, Alexa can respond to their request by indicating their name. This can bring relief to affected people, an improvement in their quality of life and a reduction in the stress suffered by the awareness of the disease. 

And the most fundamental aspect that the development demo of this application has focused on is the incorporation of the AI functionality for the NLP provided by the new “Alexa Conversations”. 

To integrate Alexa Conversations, an AMAZON.FallbackIntent has been added and an initial dialog has been generated for the demonstration (the entire application must be understood, in this state, as a mere demonstration and without any medical value) that could also be extended and scaled everything that was desired. 

To understand who this project presents this modification to competition, this change is the essence of what he wants to demonstrate in this project: 

The functionalities are important, but even more important is the quality of the user experience in their interaction with Alexa and even more so in older ages. 

For this reason, feeding the artificial intelligence that Alexa is already with more artificial intelligence in order to provide it with an even greater and better understanding of the user can be transcendent for people and even more so for people with certain difficulties of use, either because of the age, due to degenerative diseases or other reasons that can make the course of a conversation even more unpredictable. 

The ultimate goal is that whoever uses the system does not have to worry about how to speak to the system, how to speak to Alexa, that they can simply speak naturally to Alexa and that she is able to understand them in their context. 

Link to the video of the project: 
https://youtu.be/Es-AkUwymo8

Project in DevPost: https://devpost.com/software/ehealthai-alexa-skill-voice-assistant-for-health-questions