A voice-enabled bathroom scale that can scan for diabetic foot ulcers uses Amazon’s voice service, Alexa, to instruct patients to step on when they’re ready to begin. In one test, a patient responded to Alexa’s prompt by declaring, “Ready when you are.”
Anne Weiler, co-founder and CEO of Wellpepper, a Seattle company that developed the prototype scale as part of its entry in the Alexa Diabetes Challenge, might say the same thing to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) itself.
She’s among those healthcare IT entrepreneurs convinced that the future of healthcare will include human-computer voice interactions—just as soon as Amazon makes its voice services compliant with healthcare privacy laws.
