Alexa, How Do I Feel Today? Smart Speakers for Healthcare and Wellbeing: an Analysis About Uses and Challenges

One of the artificial intelligence applications with an increasing popularity is related to conversational agents. Indeed, the virtual assistants are conversational agents capable of handling a spoken dialogue with people providing information and various types of services. How can virtual assistants and smart speakers be used for healthcare purposes? The virtual assistant, understood as digital services designed to simulate human conversation and provide personalized responses based on input from the users, currently can be effectively exploited to realize self-care solutions for the people, who can use them to seek information, contact doctors, monitor their health parameters and adherence to therapies; but also, as a hands-free support for practitioners to optimize workflows in hospitals or small clinics. They can be used also to provide useful information for innovative health programs at large scale patient-centered. This contribution contains an analysis about the use of virtual assistants in healthcare, conducted through the exploration of scientific studies and research dealing with the topic concerning the use of conversational agents in healthcare. The analysis aims at systematizing current functionalities, through a new cataloging scheme based on contexts of use and end users. The increasing use of virtual assistants in healthcare can impact society thanks to its strengths. At the same time, a number of critical points have emerged and still exist which provide ground for further challenges need to be addressed to ensure that the associated risks are reduced.