ultimate night on Saturday night time live, a spoof commercial for an “Alexa Silver” poked mild enjoyable at how an Alexa speaker will be used with the aged to do things like take heed to their lengthy, rambling stories (and respond with “uh-huh”), as well as solution questions even when addressed as “Alaina,” “Allegra,” “Aretha,” or other names.
however the usage of an Alexa tool with senior electorate is in truth a good idea – as a hack at these days’s TechCrunch Disrupt ny 2017 hackathon displayed.
The hack’s creator, Brett Krutiansky, a computer science pupil at Northeastern in Boston, says he came up with the speculation for “elderly Alexa” because both of his grandparents need further care. His grandfather suffers from dementia and his grandmother has trouble seeing, and each have vertigo.
His mother is frequently involved and wired about her oldsters’ well-being – now and again frantically calling neighbors when she couldn’t attain them at residence. Krutiansky says he’s providing his hack as a mom’s Day reward to help ease her thoughts.
The voice app he built – or “Alexa ability,” in Amazon’s lingo – is enabled on an Echo speaker, providing an interface between families and their family members who need additional care.
through “elderly Alexa,” the elderly can ask Alexa what medication they need to take and what they’ve already taken with the aid of announcing “Alexa, drugs.” This additionally triggers an AWS Lambda experience that emails their members of the family monitoring their care.
Alexa will reply to customers’ questions about medication by way of telling them the identify of the remedy they want to take, dosage, and time of day it needs to be taken
she is going to then ask if they’d already taken the remedy. whether or not the consumer solutions “sure” or “no,” an e-mail is distributed to the family member tracking their care.
in addition, the member of the family can ship again the next merchandise on their to-do checklist in an accompanying iOS app or call them to remind them about their treatment. the speculation is that, if this day-to-day e-mail doesn’t arrive, the member of the family will know one thing may be wrong and may network with others in a group chat room to speak about. for example, household may come to a decision who’s using over that day to take a look at in on mother or dad.
after all, Krutiansky notes, the Alexa Sill can be used with any person wanting further care – now not just the elderly.
The mission was built using the following technologies: AWS (DynamoDB, Lambda, & SES), Node JavaScript for the Alexa code, Swift for the iOS app, and PubNub APIs for the chat room.
Following the hackathon, Krutiansky says he’ll work to make the chat machine more consumer-pleasant, will strengthen the frenzy notification gadget, and can introduce reminders for the checklist in the iOS app so care suppliers might also needless to say what they need to do.
in the future, he also needs to add performance to remind grandparents about other things they want to do as well.
“every so often, my grandfather [who has dementia] forgets to shower,” he says. “My mom desires to grasp he’s been in the shower that day.” Alexa may later remind him about this, alongside with his medications.
whereas there have been other units which have been designed for elderly care specifically, Krutiansky believes the ubiquity and price of Echo audio system is an advantage.
“I’ve viewed that one,” he says, referring to the instinct Robotics speaker, for example. “but it surely’s a pair hundred bucks versus $ 50,” he said pointing to the Echo Dot.
Krutiansky plans to put up it to the Alexa talent store so his mother can use it soon.
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