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. 2020 Sep 16:3:122.
doi: 10.1038/s41746-020-00332-0. eCollection 2020.

Readiness for voice assistants to support healthcare delivery during a health crisis and pandemic

Emre Sezgin  1 , Yungui Huang  1 , Ujjwal Ramtekkar  1 , Simon Lin  1
Affiliations

Readiness for voice assistants to support healthcare delivery during a health crisis and pandemic

Emre Sezgin et al. NPJ Digit Med. .

Abstract

To prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to continue responding to healthcare needs, hospitals are rapidly adopting telehealth and other digital health tools to deliver care remotely. Intelligent conversational agents and virtual assistants, such as chatbots and voice assistants, have been utilized to augment health service capacity to screen symptoms, deliver healthcare information, and reduce exposure. In this commentary, we examined the state of voice assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa) as an emerging tool for remote healthcare delivery service and discussed the readiness of the health system and technology providers to adapt voice assistants as an alternative healthcare delivery modality during a health crisis and pandemic.

Keywords: Health policy; Public health.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Voice assistant (VA) use for emergency information delivery.
Healthcare providers and agencies support with the regulations, infrastructure and resources to be shared with technology providers. Technology providers identify the resources and connect to retrieve up-to-date information over an emergency information database, which is used to inform end-users via VA while using AI to personalize the content.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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