A Discussion with Fahad Aziz of Caremerge

VFH Episode 35

In this episode, Teri welcomes Fahad Aziz, the Co-founder and CTO at Caremerge, and a Forbes contributor.

Fahad Aziz has a tremendous amount of experience in technology, artificial intelligence, and voice. He is also a contributor to Forbes Magazine where he covers technologies in healthcare. Caremerge leverages Artificial Intelligence and Voice to offer the most innovative wellness and engagement platform for senior living communities. They have been tackling some of the biggest pain points that users have when it comes to using voice technology in their homes and living facilities.

Caremerge was named one of the 2018 Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies in the US and have won a number of awards.

Key points from Fahad Aziz!

Caremerge is doing innovative work in the seniors’ living space to support seniors wherever they may be living.
Caremerge’s has formal partnerships with Amazon to help them address some of the pain points that seniors have when using voice technology.

Fahad’s Background

He has been in technology for over 15 years and while working with different organizations he felt inspired to start something new. He decided to quit his job and move to Chicago.
He had the opportunity to spend some time in a seniors’ community in the suburbs of Chicago, where he witnessed a lot of challenges. He decided to do something to solve those challenges. That was the birth of Caremerge and since then, they have been serving 400 communities with over 100,000 residents.
In their interactions with the communities, they saw the need for voice technology to be implemented in the communities.
He did research that he published on Forbes. Part of the research was on what voice technology could do for seniors and the results showed that the technology could connect hundreds of thousands of people to technology.
Caremerge was the first one to build a product like theirs.

The Caremerge Product

They started with basic features like allowing residents to ask simple questions such as, “What’s on the menu. What are the activities today? Has the mail arrived?” Once they deployed that, they saw a need for more. They wanted more capabilities to answer questions correctly.
They spent a lot of time improving their AI engines and creating their own models for understanding questions and answering them correctly. They then launched their Alexa technology and started seeing an increase in their adoption.
They got involved with Amazon to help them build an Enterprise Fleet Management System that would be used to deploy hundreds of thousands of Alexa devices from one portal and ensure their effective management.

Name Free Invocation of Skills

The biggest challenge that came to them with Alexa and voice technology, was that seniors had difficulties remembering to invoke the skills.
They worked with Amazon to further improve their system that it was then deployed through the fleet management system so that seniors didn’t need to say, “Alexa, ask the community”, they would just say, “Alexa, what’s on the menu?” They were able to eliminate the invocation command .

A Discussion with Fahad Aziz of Caremerge

Feedback from Users

They have received mixed feedback. There has been a lot of excitement, but they are now going into a bit of a lull.
They are waiting for that “aha” moment when people will realize that their product is exactly what they want.
They are in the phase where people have bought their devices and enjoyed the first few weeks, but their uses for the devices have plateaued a bit.
Some other feedback is that people love the whole voice experience. They like the fact that they don’t have to pick up the device to get whatever information they need. They use Alexa in the most mind-blowing ways.

New Features

They just rolled out a reminders feature. This enables people to set up reminders with Alexa, and then Alexa will wake up to remind a user of specific requests.

Google Assistant

They are planning on designing their platform for Google Assistant too.
The only difference with Google Assistant is that they don’t have a fleet management system at this point, so it would be more challenging for enterprise deployments than it is with Alexa.

Alexa’s HIPAA Compliance

They are very excited about this development.
They have been part of the program and watching it very closely as an Amazon partner.
This development shifts the burden of liability. Before Alexa’s HIPAA compliance, the care providers were liable for any Alexa device in their buildings. Now, when a vendor deploys a device, they sign a BAA agreement while Amazon will sign the same, which takes a bit of liability away from the care provider or community.
Caremerge can now comfortably deploy their devices due to compliance.

The Future for Caremerge

They are doing more research on how to further improve their response model (how to better answer questions).
They are also continuously working on their reminders and notifications features.
They are working with Amazon to address and improve data privacy and safety issues.