If you thought smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo were only built for use in the living room, think again.?
Increasingly, more doctors are using smart speakers during medical procedures to use voice commands where they can't use a traditional computer for help.
Smart speakers can help during surgery
According to new research presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 2019 Annual Scientific Meeting, the usefulness of smart speakers was detailed in a hospital environment.
The research found that smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home offer a much needed conversational voice interface, thereby allowing interventional radiology (IR) physicians to ask questions and retrieve information essential for their patient treatments without breaking sterile scrub or using a traditional computer.
smart speakers getting used in hospitals
"When you're in the middle of a procedure, you need to remain sterile, so you lose the ability to use a computer," said Kevin Seals, MD, a fellow in interventional radiology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and lead author of the study was quoted by EurekaAlert. "This smart speaker technology helps us to quickly and intelligently make decisions relevant to a patient's specific needs."
The researchers at UCSF developed a simple device-sizing application for the Google Home smart speaker. The application allowed on-call doctors to ask the smart speaker a voice-based question regarding a specific medical instrument and its size for a relevant procedure, and found the Google Home smart speaker responding to them successfully -- just like a live human assistant.
After the successful trial of smart speakers inside hospital environments, the plan is to widen its scope of use and make healthcare more cost-effective and beneficial for doctors as well as patients.