 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment, Dr. Justin Marley, he is a consultant psychiatrist for the NHS in the UK. Chris Ashley, technology delivery lead associate manager and Gail Sarad, applied intelligence lead North America for Accenture. Thank you so much, the three of you for coming on the show. Thanks for having us. I'm really excited about the topic that we're going to have today, which is a home healthcare system for the elderly. I'm going to start with you, Dr. Marley, in terms, can you just provide the context of sort of what this problem is with an elderly person living at home, experiencing loneliness, experiencing isolation? Can you paint the portrait for our viewers? Yeah, certainly. So the older adult population is heterogenous, but what happens is as people get older, they retire from work, they lose part of their purpose in life. Sadly, they lose loved ones in their lives and can often find themselves at home by themselves. As people get older, they start to develop cognitive impairment. It may not be at the level of dementia, or it may be at the level of dementia. And so they become increasingly isolated and there's something called the digital divide, which is basically, we're living in a connected world, which is permeated with digital technology to help connect people. The older adult population haven't grown up with this technology, so they're a little bit disconnected from all of this, which just adds to everything else. So what is the idea here? So he's just described older people who are lonely, who are experiencing forgetfulness, they've lost a lot of their friends and social connections. So what's the answer? What's the solution here? So our mission is to help people feel socially connected in this, it's always changing this digital world and stay independent in their own home for a bit longer. So what we've done is we've made an Alexa skill and web portal. So an Alexa skill is just like an app on your iPhone. And it's really about day-to-day help, everyday little things, so medicine reminders or finding things that are happening in their area and just a bit more independence, a bit more joy day-to-day. So Gail, so what does this look like in practice? So we have this Alexa who is in a person's home and reminding the person to take his or her pills and just providing a little connection. So just describe to me what it looks like. Yeah, so I mean, well, if you kind of take a step back a minute and you think about this as Dr. described, the impact of an individual sitting at home alone and you think about their daily lives and what they're doing. This solution starts by really thinking about what are they doing on a daily basis and what's going to motivate them to get up and get engaged. So, you know, fundamentally, this solution thinks about the process that they do and it's constantly learning the behaviors that they're doing on a daily basis. And as you know, right, there's constant reminders. You start to get forgetful. So there's activities that you have to do and if you don't do, you become stagnant, lonely. And so getting a system that allows them to learn their behaviors, understand what those behaviors are and what's gonna motivate them to wake up, get excited every day, feel engaged. The fundamentally, the system is about learning that and nudging them to get engaged and move forward. The thing I really love about this is, you know, if you think about sort of what we're doing here, you know, fundamentally, we're taking really sophisticated technologies, you know, artificial intelligence and voice recognition and applying it to an everyday process, which is like so exciting to see the application of the elderly, right, adopting a solution like this and being able to reach out and engage through this new technology channel. And it is, as you said, it's learning the behaviors, it's learning the proclivities, but it's also providing a bit of social interaction for these people who are incredibly lonely. What have you seen, Dr. Marley? So what we've seen is from the Hanover project, which the Liquid Studio team in London have been working on, which is some of the work in sheltered accommodation with older adults, and Chris can talk a little bit about that. We've also been trialling it in a young onset dementia group as well. So we're looking at people with dementia across the lifespan, both young and old, and we've had some very promising feedback from the younger group as well. So, yes, how are you using this for people who are experiencing the onset of dementia? So the idea is that, well, first of all, what we've had to do is to start a trial, a pilot study. So we're currently going through the ethics committee process, which is very important for vulnerable adults. We can't just trial a new technology in this group. But we've had a design session with the Liquid Studio team. They've come in and they've showcased the technology within the group, and this is a group of people with young onset dementia and their carers. And we've had some very interesting feedback about how they can communicate with it and how easy it is to understand and some of the features that we've been developing, such as information about the condition that they can access from the home care solution. Chris, I want to ask you about the role of empathy in technology. So here is artificial intelligence, which is, it's not human intelligence, it's not our human social intelligence, but yet, empathy is so important, particularly in a technology like this. Can you talk about how you approach this question? So, I take your point completely. It is AI, it's not a real human, and ultimately we would love it if every single old person had human contact every day, but it's just not the case. And I have sat with people, one of whom is my nan, and genuinely, she was just like, it's really nice to have a voice in the house. My granddad's been dead for 15 years. She's been alone for 15 years in that same house, and she loves it. When Alexa sang her happy birthday, because it was configured with the birth, I put her birthday in, and she was just like, I love it. She says goodnight to it. It's like, oh, you know, sleep well. I do call her regularly, but knowing that she has that is amazing. So it's giving peace of mind to the loved ones too, exactly. So talk a little bit more about what, so we've already seen great success. Adoption is on the rise. What are some of the things that you hope to add to this application going forward? So we see it at the moment as a companion. So it might be for people with dementia, it might just be for people who are alone and they feel a bit socially isolated. So the Alexa platform is very powerful. It offers a very simple way to do things like radio. If you want to mess around with an iPad, unlock it, make sure it's charged, find your contact, call it. It's much easier to say, Alexa, call my daughter. So that's the things that we have, and that's a great service. What we can add very quickly is IoT sensors. So if you put a sensor on the fridge, on the bathroom door, in the bed, you work out whether people are sleeping enough, whether they're eating enough food, whether they're drinking enough, and you're augmenting that role of the caregiver that comes along and sees, hang on, this person hasn't been sleeping very well at all for the last few days. One of the things we get people to do when they interact with home care is just say, how are you feeling today? And they say good or bad. And over time, you build up a picture of that person's mental health. Because Alexa has built a rapport with her roommate. Yeah, absolutely. So what you're describing, it sounds like a very user-friendly, a straightforward interface that is perfect for people on the other side of the digital divide, as you just described. So how do you work with technologists, Dr. Marley, in terms of helping the technologists understand where these customers are? I mean, so many, and I have a member of my family who had Alzheimer's, and the idea was meet the person where they are. So if they come to you and tell you that it's Christmas day, and you know, you say, it is, Merry Christmas. But how do you help the technologists sort of get that? I mean, it comes back to the empathy. So in terms of where the person is, there are many different barriers to the use of technology. There's sensory impairment. There's, for example, if someone has a moderate to severe level of dementia, then it will be very difficult for them to interact with the device. So we have to kind of work with carers to work with them. So there's all sorts of kind of complications about taking this out into the real world. And what we're also looking to do is develop a service with the AI at the front end backed up by healthcare professionals at the back end so that we can quickly escalate if there's problems. Because the last thing that you want is someone to run into problems for the technology to be able to detect that there's something is amiss, and not to be able to do anything about it. So I think combining the AI with all of the warning signs flagged up by the algorithms with healthcare professionals in the background, ready to escalate to in-house services is the best of both worlds and gets the right services to the person at the right time. And I think that's only possible through this combination. Yeah, it's an extraordinary story. I mean, it's really been a great conversation. Thank you all so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing it with our viewers. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up our coverage of today's AWS executive summit. Join us tomorrow for more from AWS re-invent.