Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Early User Centered Insights on Voice Integrated Technologies Through Retrospective Analysis

2017; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2196/iproc.8576

2369-6893

Marty Coyne, Colby Thomas, Ashley N. Collimore, Christopher Franzese, C. Jinshong Hwang,

AI in Service Interactions

Background: There is increasing interest in incorporating voice-activated technology (VAT), such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana, into the existing connected health, mHealth, and mobile medical app ecosystems. VATs allow for natural-language interactions and offer patients the promise of increased usability, greater engagement, and improved adherence to treatments and/or medications. Despite this interest, there is little ethnographic data on patients’ use of VAT or unmet needs. This data is critical to developing VAT applications that interact with medical devices, where regulatory or design control considerations require a higher level of rigor compared to unregulated consumer applications. As first-mover, Amazon Alexa technology has dominated the VAT market; customer reviews of Alexa-enabled devices outnumber the next closest technology 19 to 1. We hypothesized that Amazon Alexa was a good proxy for VAT users at large, and that systematic coding and analysis of 95,000 reviews for Amazon Alexa devices could provide insights that would accelerate follow-on research efforts to support development of user-centered VAT applications for connected health.