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A lot of Alexa skills available today are designed to keep you healthy.
WebMD can help you diagnose an illness, Track by Nutritionix can monitor your diet, and the American Heart Association‘s skill can tell you what to do if you’re having a heart attack.
Here’s a few more health-related skills drawn from the Trending and New Skills categories in the Alexa Skills Marketplace.
In recent Alexa news, the assistant can make orders with two-hour delivery service Amazon Prime Now, and a government trial program was announced to use intelligent assistants like Alexa to connect citizens with services and businesses.
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Dr. A.I. by HealthTap
New to the Alexa Skills Marketplace, the Dr. A.I. skill listens to any symptoms you are experiencing — like a fever, rash, or headache — and asks for more details. Then the skill tells you possible explanations or diagnoses. When this process is complete, you are given the choice to speak with a real human doctor. HealthTap makes money by offering video appointments with more than 100,000 doctors.
Mylestone
Mylestone is an Alexa skill for recounting old memories.
You begin using Mylestone by uploading five photos, videos, or audio files to mylestone.com. Myestone then generates an audio story based on the materials you provided. Each memory is given a specific name, so you can ask Alexa to play “Sophie’s first steps memory” or “last weekend memory.”
Though you could use Mylestone to track fitness goals or other other health-related activities, it isn’t specifically a skill for your physical health. Still, it could be a good Alexa skill for your mental health.
Virgin Pulse
This skill is made especially for the 1.9 million people who use the Virgin Pulse wellness program as part of health insurance provided through their job. Depending on who you work for, meeting health goals can mean a reduction or discount in health care fees.
The skill can log exercise or sleep or check on your goals, but Virgin wants the skill to grow to share info on “more of Virgin Pulse’s 150+ trackable health habits,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
Corporate wellness programs have long been seen as a way to reduce health care costs for patients and employers.
Fitbit
The Fitbit Alexa skill will tell you about your resting heart rate, calories burned, and progress toward fitness goals.
My biggest gripe with the Fitbit skill and other wearable technologies is that they give you lots of data but few actionable insights. The skill does not yet, for example, tell you to go to bed early, based on your levels of sleep in recent days, nor does it make prescriptive suggestions about exercise.
KidsMD
This skill provides medication dosing recommendations for Ibuprofen (a.k.a Advil), and Acetaminophen (a.k.a Tylenol), based on guidelines followed by medical professionals at Boston Children’s Hospital. It’s functionality today isn’t much, but this is the sort of skill that demonstrates a great potential to tie the highly technical work of supplying medication dosage or instructions to voice-powered devices. It makes a lot of sense to bring the two together.
