Smart Speakers, the Next Frontier in Computational Health

TL;DR

Smart speakers offer new opportunities for health monitoring and intervention through passive sensing, active diagnostics, and conversational interactions, potentially transforming out-of-hospital healthcare while raising privacy and regulatory challenges.

Contribution

This paper explores the potential of smart speakers in health applications, highlighting three interaction mechanisms and discussing associated clinical uses, privacy, and regulatory issues.

Findings

Smart speakers can passively detect medical emergencies.

They enable remote monitoring of respiratory diseases.

Multiple modalities of interaction have distinct clinical applications.

Abstract

The rapid dissemination and adoption of smart speakers has enabled substantial opportunities to improve human health. Just as the introduction of the mobile phone led to considerable health innovation, smart speaker computing systems carry several unique advantages that have the potential to catalyze new fields of health research, particularly in out-of-hospital environments. The recent rise and ubiquity of these smart computing systems hold significant potential for enhancing chronic disease management, enabling passive identification of unwitnessed medical emergencies, detecting subtle changes in human behavior and cognition, limiting isolation, and potentially allowing widespread, passive, remote monitoring of respiratory diseases that impact the public health. There are 3 broad mechanisms for how a smart speaker can interact with a person to improve health. These include (i) as an intelligent conversational agent, (ii) a passive identifier of medically relevant diagnostic sounds and (iii) active sensing using the device's internal hardware to measure physiologic parameters, such as with active sonar, radar or computer vision. Each of these different modalities have specific clinical use cases, all of which need to be balanced against potential privacy concerns, equity related to system access and regulatory frameworks which have not yet been developed for this unique type of passive data collection.