Is Google Home a Trojan Horse in Healthcare?

In this study, recently-diagnosed diabetes patients were asked to use the technology to have "heart to heart" conversations with Alexa about what they want their friends and family to understand about their disease and what they are going through. The researchers found that patients were having genuine, meaningful conversations with Alexa about their disease, but the downside was that Alexa still sounds very robotic, which raised the question of whether or not Alexa or other voice-assisted technologies need to sound more human in order to have these types of conversations with patients and have the same impact? "We don't think so," Bogdalek said. "We would like to see Alexa become a little bit more real [sounding] but not too real to be able to distinguish between a human and something that's a robot. We can still get that same outcome either way." Patients also completed five-minute daily wellness surveys to track their dietary and lifestyle choices that impact their diabetes management, and Bogdalek said the feedback on this portion of the study from participants was interesting in that it seemed to really impact the choices they made because they felt accountable to Alexa. "People actually started feeling a little guilty to Alexa when they did this, 'man, I really shouldn't eat that cake,' or 'I really shouldn't overeat on my carbohydrates today because I'm going to have to talk to Alexa about that, and she's probably going to judge me, a little bit'," Bogdalek said. "The ...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: BIOMEDevice Boston Digital Health Source Type: news