In 2023, Amazon started offering Alexa Smart Properties for senior living in Spain. Sanitas Mayores, the care home division of Sanitas, wanted to be among the first to use it: a device with a screen in every room, connected to SanIA, Sanitas’s artificial intelligence, useful both for residents and for the people who care for them.
Sanitas’s technical team would handle development. They asked us for our experience, because we’d spent years designing conversations on Alexa, in Spanish.
The challenge
A care home has many different people around the same device. Residents, families and staff talk to Alexa, but not all of them can access the same information.
And these are older people. Many speak slowly, pause for a long time or have poor eyesight. That changes how long the assistant listens, how much information it gives at once and what the screen is for.
What we did
We supported the Sanitas team from the start. We helped them choose the first use cases and design conversations for older people, combining voice and screen. We also advised them on connecting Alexa to SanIA and preparing for production.
We insisted on testing early with real residents and staff. In a setting like this, what we imagine about how people speak is very often wrong.
Results
In October 2023, when Amazon launched the service in Spain, Sanitas announced (in Spanish) that it was the first care company in the country to integrate it. It started in two care homes in Madrid.
There, residents can call their families, check activities and appointments, turn on the lights or change the temperature by voice, and play games. Staff use Alexa to send them reminders and messages.
What we learned here later helped us bring Alexa to a hospital, in the Sanitas Hospitals project.
