Alexa could diagnose Alzheimer's and other brain conditions -- should it?

It's an increasingly common experience: You wander into the kitchen, quietly muttering under your breath, when you hear a disembodied feminine voice say, "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that." We can all agree that Alexa's tendency to eavesdrop is, at times, a little creepy. But is it possible to harness that ability to improve our health? That's the question that researcher David Simon and his coauthors sought to answer in a recent paper published in Cell Press. Simon, a legal ethicist at Harvard University, and his team imagined a hypothetical near-future scenario in which Alexa came equipped with the power to diagnose cognitive conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia simply by analyzing an elder person's speech patterns.