Language engineering and the pathway to healthcare

Abstract

This position paper looks critically at a number of aspects of current research into spoken language translation (SLT) in the medical domain. We first discuss the user profile for medical SLT, criticizing designs which assume that the doctor will necessarily need or want to control the technology. If patients are to be users on an equal standing, more attention must be paid to usability issues. We focus briefly on the issue of feedback in SLT systems, pointing out the difficulties of relying on text-based paraphrases. We consider the delicate issue of evaluating medical SLT systems, noting that some of the standard and much-used evaluation techniques for all aspects of the SLT chain might not be suitable for use with real users, even if they are role-playing. Finally, we discuss the idea that the "pathway to healthcare" involves much more than a face-to-face interview with a medical professional, and that different technologies including but not restricted to SLT will be appropriate along this pathway.

A bidirectional grammar-based medical speech translator

“…In accordance with the basic principles of patientcenteredness and shared decision-making outlined in Section 1, the patient and the physician each have their own headset, use their own mouse, and share the same view of the screen. This is in sharp contrast to the majority of the medical speech translation systems described in the literature (Somers, 2006).…”

Syrian Refugees and Digital Health in Lebanon

“…In similar contexts, community-led video education systems allowed social workers to compose locally relevant health education videos [19,24] which can then be viewed by women in the community. Tiwari and Sorathia [32] used an audio visual application that allows mothers of low literacy to call for emergency services and identify, through pictures, their health problems. Audio recorded advice would then be sent accordingly.…”

“…In terms of promoting and supporting refugee health, a small number of initiatives have given healthcare providers language translation tools to facilitate patient-clinician interaction [11,32]. Baranoff et al [4] used Near Field Communication (NFC) tags to support refugees to familiarize themselves with their new surroundings.…”

“…It aims to contextualize the use of technology with the health beliefs, health experiences, and social and health networks of refugees in need of ANC. While most technologies for refugee health are designed for use by healthcare providers [11,32] , previous research also identified a high use of smartphones and communication applications such as Whatsapp among refugees [38], which affords an opportunity to empower refugees in their antenatal health through digital interventions. To this end, we investigated opportunities and factors that can meaningfully inform technology design for antenatal health in the context of this marginalized community.…”

WebWOZ

“…Systems like Let's Go [23] and DARPA communicator [31] were used to provide customers with schedule information over the telephone for flights [ 13], trains [17] and buses [29]. Speech technologies have been integrated with MT in prototypes which support multilingual communication during meetings [30], doctor-patient consulations [25] and travelling [21]. MT for more general purposes is available online, e.g.…”