This hospital pilots Alexa-enabled smart patient rooms

Hospitals are perhaps the best places for the use of smart speakers. Cedars-Sinai, a non-profit hospital in Los Angeles, is looking at adding a touch of smart to the patient rooms.

In order to understand the potential of using Alexa to make healthcare better, Cedars-Sinai has enabled more than 100 patient rooms with the voice assistant-powered platform called Aiva, the hospital announced in its official blog.

The platform allows patients to control their entertainment and interact hands-free with nurses. It is the world’s first patient-cantered voice assistant platform for hospitals.

Cedars-Sinai is running the pilot where Amazon’s smart voice-enabled assistant Alexa is at disposal of the patients through the smart speakers, who can instruct it to control their TVs, play music, check the weather, read the news, or call out to the nurses for help with medicine or use the restroom.

The commands have been designed in such a manner that patient’s requests through Alexa are routed to the mobile phone of the relevant caregiver. Only the registered nurse will receive the pain medicine request while a bathroom request would be routed to a clinical partner.