HandsFree Health launches voice-enabled virtual health assistant platform with Azure AI

HandsFree Health was founded by seasoned healthcare executives who are passionate about simplifying healthcare management. The company is the creator of WellBe, the premier voice enabled virtual health assistant platform. WellBe is a trusted, HIPAA compliant voice platform built on the Microsoft suite of products and services including Microsoft Azure, Azure Cognitive Services for Speech, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

HandsFree Health offers a suite of integrated health and wellness products for consumers and businesses to move individuals closer to compliance and optimal health. HandsFree Health devices, including the WellBe smart speaker, smart watch, pendant and mobile apps, enable customers to manage their health and wellness and operate hundreds of smart home and medical devices using simple voice commands.

The importance of voice in healthcare

The HandsFree Health team could not ignore the growing demand for voice assistants. 

“Through market research, we learned that over 120 million US adults will have used a voice assistant at least once per month in 2022, nearly tripling the totals in 2018,” says Mark Lane, Director of Software Engineering. “And most people interact with voice assistants daily and nearly half get a sense of companionship from them. Based on these trends, we believe voice is critically important to the healthcare landscape of the future.”

With Microsoft Cognitive Services, the implementation of voice in the HandsFree Health solution has been straightforward.

Microsoft from the start

HandsFree Health made the decision from the start to leverage Microsoft technologies where it could, and it has paid great dividends. At its inception, HandsFree Health joined the BizSpark program to take advantage of credits, resources, and expertise to launch its infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. For more than five years, it has experienced extraordinary security, reliability and scalability using Azure to deliver its services and is now part of the Microsoft Startups program. Azure has proven to be easy for the organization’s small team to manage so that it can focus on developing health and wellness solutions.

Leveraging Microsoft development tools and Cognitive Services

It was important to HandsFree Health that it use standard and widely supported development languages and tools. To that end, it leveraged Visual Studio and DevOps for its application lifecycle management. The organization developed its client software solutions in C# and Xamarin while leveraging Microsoft Cognitive Services for Keyword Recognition, Speech to Text, Speaker Identification, and Text to Speech. The HandsFree Health server software utilizes Natural Language Processing (LUIS) and QnA Maker in concert with ASP.NET Core 6 API services, and Azure Kubernetes Services for backend processing. Handsfree Health has also implemented the Vision API to make entering prescription information as easy as taking a picture. HandsFree Health demonstrated this feature in a keynote presentation at a recent Microsoft Build conference.

“Azure Cognitive Services allowed us to rapidly develop and launch our WellBe products as we were able to lean on Microsoft for its AI expertise with speech and natural language, and we were able to concentrate much of our engineering efforts within our domain expertise of health and wellness” says Lane, Director of Software Engineering at HandsFree Health.

The path forward with Microsoft

HandsFree Health also leverages Microsoft for analytics and the back office. Data required by and collected from the WellBe platform uses SQL Server, Azure tables, and blob storage as well as a Synapse Data Warehouse.  Dashboards to drive business decisions are developed using Microsoft Power BI. HandsFree Health’s device inventory and financial systems are all managed through Business Central. Additionally, the HandsFree Health team is using Office 365 and interact day to day remotely using Teams. 

As HandsFree Health continues to grow, Microsoft is certain to be a partner in its success. “Having Microsoft as our primary technology partner, knowing that it is investing in Azure, in security, in cognitive services, and artificial intelligence gives me the peace of mind necessary to focus on growing and improving our product suite,” says Eric Weaver, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at HandsFree Health.

In collaboration with Microsoft, HandsFree Health will further develop its HIPAA compliant AI driven solutions including remote patient monitoring capabilities, and integration with electronic medical records (EMR’s)