Voice assistants should offer users ‘more thorough’ information on CRC screening
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SAN DIEGO — A pilot study presented at Digestive Disease Week 2022 demonstrated that while voice assistants performed well in providing clinically accurate information on colorectal cancer screening, improvements are still needed.
“Because colorectal cancer rates are increasing in the younger population, 30s and 40s, it’s very important for these virtual assistants to provide appropriate advice, because their users are going to skew towards the younger ages — 20s, 30s and 40s,” Atul Sinha, MD, of Nassau University Medical Center in New York, told Healio. “We think that older users will not use this technology and will just talk to their physician, but the younger patients we’re seeing are actually showing us this information on their phones. We want clinicians to be aware of how the public accesses information and how they consume medical information prior to seeing a physician.”
To determine whether voice assistants, including Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana, provide clinically appropriate advice, Sinha and colleagues recorded answers for five frequently asked questions about CRC screening and compared results using Fisher exact testing.
Investigators found Apple Siri and Google Assistant provided clinically appropriate advice 100% of the time, followed by Amazon Alexa (60%) and Microsoft Cortana (40%), but noted that Google Assistant was the only one that included advertisements in its results.
Although the voice assistants accurately echoed the May 2021 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation to start screening at age 45 years, they all fell short of advising users to seek medical attention.
“None of the virtual assistants actually instructed the user to go see a physician, which we found very surprising, particularly for somebody who's actually trying to find out if what they're experiencing are the symptoms of colon cancer,” Sinha said.
Overall, he noted, there is room for improvement in terms of how patients are redirected and the amount of information they receive when using this technology.
“If someone’s going out of their way to actually look up this information, we feel like these companies have a responsibility to the users to provide accurate and more thorough information,” Sinha said.
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Sinha A, et al. Abstract Tu1661. Presented at: Digestive Disease Week; May 21-24, 2022; San Diego (hybrid meeting).
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