| Sumario: | Purpose Many older adults have to face the complex task of taking several daily medicines. Polymedicated ageing people deal with multiple drug brands, each one with corresponding taking hours and variable doses. The difficult management of drugs, along with other factors like solitude or cognitive issues, contribute to create a health problem (Maher et al., 2014). Consequently, it is estimated that a 5% of clinical emergencies that involve older adults are related with an incorrect management of medicines (Maher et al., 2014). Also, the percent of non-adherence to prescriptions from old adults is almost 50% (Unni & Farris, 2011). This complex situation can be addressed using technological solutions. Multiple technological-based proposals exist; smartphone applications, wearables, smart pillbox, etc. Nevertheless, voice assistants are relatively unexplored in this field. This technology brings the opportunity of interacting with devices just using the voice, a solution older adults can easily handle. However, the dependence on the Internet of these solutions precludes the deployment in areas where connection infrastructures are absent. To address this issue, an autonomous voice assistant prototype is introduced. This device gives reminders about the daily doses of medicines and clinical appointments to ageing people. The project operates without internet connection, thus deployment in hostile connection conditions is possible. Method The proposed solution is based on two components: a smartphone application used by professional or informal caregivers and a voice assistant device, based on a Raspberry Pi, installed in the elderly's home. The proposed solution works following a process based on three main steps: 1) the caregiver specifies the details of the clinical appointments and medicine takes in the smartphone application. Once this data is completed, 2) the voice assistant device is synchronized. This device has been designed to remind the appointments and drugs prescriptions by voice. This way, when the device detects a synchronization petition from the caregiver ("I'm synchronizing you!"), Bluetooth is activated, and the information is transferred from the caregiver's phone to the elder's voice assistant. As a result, 3) the voice assistant device programs the scheduler and, at the corresponding moments, announces the appointments and what medicines to take. Results & Discussion Results have been obtained along several lab tests. A laboratory context was built in order to analyze topics like usability of the prototype and working issues. Researchers and students were involved in the process of testing to ensure a successfully working system. It is imperative to ensure that functioning is optimal before older adults are involved in the next version of the prototype. The smartphone application was reviewed in terms of usability. It provides a simple and functional interface which integrate easily the synchronization process. On the other hand, the voice assistant device recognizes and processes the provided information. In all of the tested cases the device successfully reminds the medicine doses. Starting from this, a very interesting work line is opened. The possibilities the platform brings at helping older adults are numerous and encourage the improvement of the platform. Multiple functions will be added in next versions like deep speech options which provide answers to ageing people's questions and even asking proactively about their health status.
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