So, I’ve been pretty busy since my last Alexa Skills update! I’m now up to 25 with the certification of Recall The Date by Amazon on March 30, 2021.

Here are my 4 most recent Alexa Skills with a description of each.  Below that you’ll find a link to the updated list with the Skill Names, Descriptions, and Quick Links to find the Skill in your Alexa App.

What Should I Weigh – What Should I Weigh lets you determine in which of the 4 Weight Status Categories developed by the CDC you belong based on your height and weight. If you aren’t in the normal weight category, it calculates your normal weight range and tells you the minimum number of pounds you need to gain or lose to get within the normal range.  It will also give you nutrition and exercise tips, as well as activities you can do to burn the number of calories you specify.

Your Weight Loss Friend – Your Weight Loss Friend provides powerful tools for anyone on their journey to successful weight loss based on where they are on that journey.  Successful weight loss requires changing your eating and exercise habits.  Many experts in behavior change believe there are several Stages of Change through which a person moves as they work towards healthier habits.  Your Weight Loss Friend uses this approach to organize tools to help the user on their weight loss journey. Users can develop their Weight Loss Plan, log their Weights and Exercises, schedule Healthy Text Messages about nutrition, schedule Email Messages to help them move through the Stages of Change, learn what is a healthy weight for their height, schedule Weigh-In & Exercise Reminders, and get information about BMI, the Stages of Change, and more.

Grampa Wisdom – Grampa Wisdom is a humorous glimpse into some of the sayings and quotes as remembered by the developer of this skill, a Grampa himself. Those recollections are not always the sayings with which you may be familiar, but they are meant to be fun.

Recall The Date – Recall The Date is an easy way to log and retrieve the dates of the birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and relatives. After you have logged some, you can retrieve events for a given month or by the next number of weeks you specify.  It will also tell you whether there is an event for the day you open it, as well as when the next event you have logged will occur. These features will occur accurately for Time Zones within the United States and Canada and will be adjusted for Daylight Savings Time through 2030.

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

I am posting this rather short post to test whether I have been able to create an Alexa Skill that will read this blog. It has been challenging to get it to work, but that gave me another thing to do during this pandemic. Wish me luck!

In my last post just a few days ago I noted that I hadn’t posted for many months before that.  I have been quite busy since January focusing on developing new Alexa Skills and helping several start-up companies build healthcare & non-healthcare applications with a voice component.  I wanted to take this opportunity to post an updated table with all my 21 Alexa Skills, their descriptions, and Quick Links to them in the Alexa App on an Echo/Alexa device user’s smartphone.  Just click on the link of any of the listed Skills to check it out.   In case you don’t use Alexa, I should explain what a Skill is.  Very simply, the term “Skill” is the name Amazon has given to the applications that work with their Echo & Alexa devices.

If I were to categorize my Skills, most of them would fall into one of the following three categories:

• Humor
• Organizational
• Health & Wellness

Let me mention a few of them:

In the Humor category, Our Little Secret, provides a comical peek into what you might be saying in your home.  In it, a fictional brother & sister with psychic abilities give Secrets and Deeper Thoughts.  All the responses are entirely fictitious, but it makes you wonder what you would hear if “walls could talk!”  While the Secrets are free, the user must pay a low, one-time fee to hear the Deeper Thoughts.  Another humorous Skill is Wine Jester in which Alexa gives comical reviews of any wine you may place before her.

An example of Organizational Skills is Your Expert Log which enables the user to log experts that they may have heard about in different professions, such as, physicians, handymen, and others for retrieval later. My Favs allows the user to log their favorite meals and restaurants to be retrieved randomly. Conference Contact Helper was created after I attended a recent conference to help track the contacts made at conferences and the associated to-do list items.

Most of my certified Skills fall into the category of Health & Wellness. These first two were developed to help us focus on the goodness in our world and help improve one’s psychological health.  Kindness Counts lets the user record kindnesses for which they are the doer, recipient, or witness.  Gratitude Log lets the user log three of their blessings at a time.  After they have logged several sets, they can ask Alexa to play three randomized blessings at a time.  Healthy Text Scheduler allows the user to schedule text messages about healthy eating to help them form healthier behaviors surrounding their nutritional behaviors.  Track My Dose was designed to help individuals manage as-needed medications, so they know when to take the next dose.  They can even schedule reminders at the time the next dose can be taken.  Finally, Symptom Helper helps the user organize the symptoms they wish to discuss with their healthcare provider before an upcoming visit.  They answer several questions posed by Alexa, and she organizes that information into a concise statement that can be entered into a custom list on their Alexa App that can be shared with the clinician.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob

Click the link below to go to a table of my Alexa Skills or click the Download button on the right to download its PDF file:

In my last post, I showed some of the information that the patient could provide before their office visit displayed on their physician’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) screen. The physician could use this information to better connect with their patient and identify patients that are being affected by loneliness. Here I’ll talk about two other use cases for Alexa, the Scribe and, the Zebra Finder.

The Scribe would enable the physician to carry on a conversation with the patient and speak the elements of his or her examination of that patient without needing to break their contact with the patient. No more turning from the patient to the computer keyboard. Ideally, the Scribe would present two versions of the encounter, one in the language of medicine that would become part of the EHR and the other that the patient could understand and suggest edits if needed.

While the Scribe would be used for every office visit, the Zebra Finder would only be used for the difficult cases with which the doctor gets confronted from time to time. In medical school, you are taught that when you assess a patient’s symptoms you should think that common things occur commonly. Or, in other words, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras! However, sometimes a patient has a rare condition, a zebra.

An experience of mine in my early clinical years led me to propose Zebra Finder as another use case for Alexa in healthcare delivery. After I completed my Internal Medicine training, I joined a three-man Internal Medicine group outside Washington, D.C. One Friday evening when I was on-call, one of my associate’s patients was admitted to the hospital. He was a gentleman about 30 years old who had been having a fever for over 2 weeks without a diagnosis after undergoing extensive outpatient testing. Many tests, including chest x-ray, blood & urine cultures were all negative. Yet the patient was very ill and warranted hospitalization. While examining this patient, in addition to his fever of about 102 degrees, two things were abnormal:

1. He had tender lymph nodes in his right armpit, and
2. A small, circular, pale patch of skin on his right hand near his thumb that was anesthetic. In other words, he couldn’t feel me touch him there.

Years ago during my training, I had seen a patient who also had an anesthetic patch of skin which is indicative of Hansen’s Disease, better known as leprosy. So, based upon my exam and remembering this fact that was lodged somewhere in my brain, leprosy was my working diagnosis. Further testing confirmed the diagnosis. I recount this story not to boast, but to show how a small bit of information can be important in medicine. For some reason, that nugget of medical knowledge popped into my head. This is especially important since the amount of medical information a person going through medical training must absorb continues to explode.

So, Zebra Finder would have Alexa connect through artificial intelligence to a database of medical information. It would help the physician when they are faced with a challenging case. The physician would tell Alexa the patient’s problems and physical findings. Then Alexa would guide the physician in their examination & testing required. It would be especially useful in more remote areas of the country where access to specialists is limited.

Well, these were the use cases I have identified for Alexa during an office visit. Next time I’ll talk about some after the visit. Please feel free to leave your comments.

For Your Health – Dr. Bob