Speech-Audio Interface for Medical Information Management in Field Environments

Abstract

The outcome of emergency medical care often depends on how quickly and accurately field medical personnel can access patient background information, document their assessment and treatment of the patient, and communicate this information to those who will next receive the patient. These tasks pose a difficult challenge to field medical personnel, who must devote their eyes and hands to patients rather than to documentation. A prototype system was designed through User-centered Systems Engineering to overcome physical and cognitive constraints on mobile field medical providers' information management capabilities. This solution involved electronic patient records that could be updated through spoken inputs to a speaker-independent automatic speech recognition system and that could be accessed through spoken requests for synthesized speech outputs of their contents. To ensure rapid and accurate interpretation of spoken inputs, the system incorporated a grammar and restricted vocabulary modeled after the grammar and vocabulary spontaneously used by medics to describe medical incidents and the vocabulary on paper patient records. When tested by males and females with a variety of accents in a quiet environment, the system typically recognized more than 90% of the inputs on the first try. With background noises characteristic of field medical situations, recognition percentages were typically in the 70s and 80s. User acceptance was high, because the system allowed eyes-free, hands-free operation with speech that seemed natural, provided multiple means for remedying inputs that were not correctly interpreted, and digitally recorded the user's description of the incident.