Quizzing Alexa on health at special digital health day at UCLan

Schoolchildren were prompted to consider asking Amazon’s virtual personal assistant Alexa questions about health and care while attending a special digital health day at UCLan.

Amazon Web Services representative John Davies demonstrated the potential uses of the Alexa voice technology in health care and asked pupils to come up with ideas about how Alexa could help people.

The ideas from the brainstorming sessions which followed John’s presentation were diverse, ranging from getting Alexa to tell you when to exercise or take your medication.

Some students wanted to hand over diet control to Alexa too, with one pupil suggesting: “If you want Alexa to order you something not healthy she should tell you no and tell you to order something healthy.”

The pupils were asked to predict what health and care will look like in the future. These ideas are now being turned into an animation by a team at UCLan.

Amazon declined to comment.