A new study from Emory University has shown that AI voice assistants can significantly improve how older adults measure and report their blood pressure over the phone. The results surprised even the researchers: patients reported high satisfaction, and costs were reduced by nearly 90% compared to standard methods.
In testing with 2,000 patients, AI agents managed to contact 85% of them by phone, and more than half – about 60% – successfully completed the measurement in either English or Spanish. When blood pressure values exceeded safe limits or patients reported symptoms such as chest pain or dizziness, the system automatically alerted nurses. In this way, AI did not operate in isolation but served as the first line of support, while humans took over cases requiring urgent attention.
Most importantly, AI collected readings from as many as 1,939 patients with outdated data, improving the quality of health records from one to four stars. At the same time, costs were reduced by 88.7% compared to human staff, while average patient satisfaction ratings were above 9/10. Although researchers expected resistance to automated solutions among older populations, the opposite proved true – most perceived AI assistants as helpful and reliable.
This study clearly shows how AI will increasingly take on a role in healthcare, especially in caring for older adults. Voice assistants, which have so far mainly been used in customer support, are now opening the door to medicine. In the future, the combination of such AI voice systems with visual tools like Gemini Live could bring an entirely new dimension to healthcare.
In brief: Tech World Highlights
- MIT’s NANDA initiative revealed that only 5% of enterprise AI implementations generate revenue, with knowledge gaps and poor integrations slowing wider adoption.
- Sebastien Bubeck from OpenAI stated that GPT-5-pro can “prove new interesting mathematical theorems,” using the model to tackle open complex problems.
- Google product lead Logan Kilpatrick posted a banana emoji on X, hinting that the “nano-banana” photo-editing model being tested on LM Arena likely comes from Google.
- OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT Go, a cheaper subscription tailored for India, priced under $5 per month with the option to pay in local currency.
- ElevenLabs introduced Chat Mode, allowing users to build purely text-based conversational agents on the platform alongside voice-first systems.
AI Trending Tools:
- Co-STORM – Writing Wikipedia-style articles from scratch with the help of AI search.
- Hunyuan-A13B – Tencent’s new open-source model for hybrid reasoning.
- Qwen VLo – Alibaba’s GPT-4o-like model for image generation and editing.
