If you’re in hospital, turning off the light, warming up or calling a nurse depends on a remote, a button on the wall or someone coming in. Sanitas, one of Spain’s leading healthcare providers, wanted its patients to be able to ask for these things by voice.
We started from our work with Sanitas Mayores, which already used Alexa in care homes. The new Hospital Blua Sanitas Valdebebas, in Madrid, opened in June 2025 with Alexa in its inpatient rooms. We handled the conversation and multimodal design and the prototype, and supported Sanitas’s AI team through to launch.
The challenge
A hospital room has little in common with a smart home. The voice had to connect to the building’s systems and comply with hospital rules, on the timeline of a hospital opening.
On top of that, Alexa already responds on its own to many household commands, so we had to make sure the hospital’s commands went where they should. And not everything a patient asks for can be done: the air conditioning, for example, can’t be turned off. In those cases the assistant has to explain it naturally and offer what it can do. And the nurse call has to work every time; if something fails, the patient has to know and know what to do.
Sanitas also didn’t want paper instructions. The device itself had to show what you can ask it.
What we did
We designed the conversations and the screen for the lights, air conditioning, nurse call and TV, together with Sanitas’s design and marketing teams. We ran tests in the hospital with nursing staff: requests nobody had anticipated came up, and they helped us understand patients better.
We proposed that the idle screen act as a guide, showing example phrases. We built the prototype and supported the Sanitas team through testing, configuration and opening week.
Results
The hospital opened in June 2025 with Alexa in its rooms. At the hospital’s presentation (in Spanish), Sanitas explained that patients can adjust the temperature, the lights or the TV and ask for assistance without getting out of bed, and that this also supports clinical safety.
In the first few weeks it was already clear that patients were using it. We keep working with Sanitas on new features and on the next generation of Alexa, built on language models.
