Allergy Challenge Alexa Skill

Why

The Hacking Pediatrics team at Boston Children's Hospital hosted a hackathon as part of the Voice.Health conference, which highlighted the future of hands-free voice technology in a healthcare context.

How

Discussion & Brainstorming

The team began by brainstorming types of problems that could be relevant to voice assistant preparation. We settled on allergy food challenges due to allergy expertise in the group and the fact that food challenges are scheduled so far in advance and require very specific preparation..

We listed the steps that have to be completed in order to have a successful food allergy challenge and fleshed out the problems that arise if done incorrectly.

We mapped out the timeline from being seen at Children's the first time, through preparation for the allergy challenge, to arriving at Children's again.

Script

The skill begins 15 days before appointment and continues through the day of.

We wanted to design an interaction that would take the burden of remembering preparation details off of caretakers, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their life.

We envisioned this voice skill would take advantage of notifications, but it could be part of the daily briefing instead.

Video

The deliverable for the hackathon was a short video showing how the voice skill would function, in which we attempted to capture an ideal scenario where this voice skill could help families preparing for an allergy challenge.

I edited together this video using a combination of stock video and shots we filmed in the conference room.

Learnings

This project was my first experience at a hackathon and designing a VUI. I really enjoyed working on a team (and learned a lot from working with people I'd just met) and it was interesting to design for voice interactions considering their conversationality, as opposed to in GUI where I'm considering efficiency of interactions.