Slashdot Mirror
Device Addresses Healthcare Language Barrier
Zothecula writes "With over 170 languages spoken in the US alone, medical personnel attending an emergency or working in a busy hospital are no doubt often faced with communication problems when trying to dispense treatment. The Phrazer offers a possible solution to this problem. It is billed as the world's first multilingual communication system, where patients provide medical background information, symptoms or complaints with the help of a virtual onscreen doctor speaking in their own native tongue. This information is then summarized into a medical record compatible with all major EMR systems." All that for only 12 to 18 thousand dollars.
With a flick of his magical cane he can diagnose anything.
I think i'll wait until theres a app for my iphone for $2.99
The first thing that app will tell you is "I don't care what the symptoms are, it's not Lupus."
With the low cost of modern computer technology, why does this device have to be THAT pricey? Just wondering.
Low volumes. They might put one into every ambulance and ten into each emergency department but thats not the same as selling ipods or iphones by the million.
Funny story: my son was in hospital and I had him psyched up for a blood test. Not easy, I knew it was going to be a battle. Then the nurse wheeled in this big machine with gadgets hung on the outside. It looked like a torture machine from star wars. Of course he freaked out. It was their jazzed portable video player. Meant to distract the kids but it didn't work for us.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... the only phrase it knows is "Perhaps today is a good day to die". That keeps the whole health care process pretty simple.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Please fondle my buttocks!"
And how many non-English monolingual people are there in the US?
Quite a few, and far more who can order a sandwich or find a restroom but get stumped by 'Do you have a family history of hypertension or cardiac arrhythmia?'
You're arguing semantics. Whether or not we do that, we're still going to have to have our ambulance crews and first responders be able to handle tourists without a good grasp of English that might fall ill while on holiday here. Do you really think it's going to be good for our standing in the world if it gets around that our arrogant need to self aggrandize just cost one of their citizens' lives?
With the low cost of modern computer technology, why does this device have to be THAT pricey? Just wondering.
Are you kidding? You must not be familiar with the US health care system...
Medical liability insurance.
tens of millions.
Plus some tourists.
Plus the people who can usually speak English but while in shock or just after suffering head trauma can't manage it for a little while.
Plus the people who have can speak English for every day life but can't quite pull off medical terminology.
Here's an idea: why not make English an official language of the United States. English is already the unofficial language used when doing international business, and it is also the language most often used in science.
If Pakistan can have English as their official language then why not the United States?
Because "official languages" are languages used by government, not languages people are forced to use with ER after severe head trauma. "Sorry, you have to communicate only in English" doesn't sound like something someone dedicated to saving lives is going to want to have to say.
However, this system seems to imply that people whose stronger languages aren't English are literate enough in those other languages to comprehend the feedback in not only triage, but a complete medical diagnostic. I find this a bit of wishful thinking. But if the device can actually pull it off, it's price tag is extremely cheap.
I'm a physician, and this kind of stuff is medical shovelware. It will be sold to some poor hospital administrator somewhere who is not medically trained but who thinks that this sounds like a right easy solution to the problem of those non-English-speaking people who keep bumping up the delay times in the ER (a real problem in parts of the country that are just now seeing significant Hispanic influx, like much of the South and Midwest). Meanwhile, the doctors and nurses at the front line will find it ill-suited to what they actually need to accomplish. Flash cards work pretty well for most communication to rule out immediately life-threatening illnesses. After that, you really need a highly qualified translator. Maybe in five years, or a decade, machines will be at that point (although they'll be Google Translate's server farms, not some hand-held piece of junk), but they're not there yet, and it's wasteful and stupid to pretend that they are.
English and Spanish are without a doubt the two most common languages spoken in the US. But it's a rare day that I can get to work (in Manhattan) without hearing at least four languages spoken -- most often English, Spanish, German (tourists. whenever there are non-English speaking tourists in NYC, they are inevitably German) and some form of Chinese, but I lack the skill to tell the dialects apart. Less often I get Russian, Greek, Korean, Vietnamese, French, or Hindi. About once a week I hear something that I can't identify (I recently found myself staring at some guy because I was fascinated by the cadence of his language. I had it pegged as something African but couldn't do better than that in the two minutes I was near him).
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Go to another country and they will find someone who can speak English with relative ease. English is spoken globally and unlike the US, most people in other developed countries (and undeveloped countries!) speak more than one language.
So cheap they can't even afford to use different vowels in the word "cheep"
It's hard, especially since regional accents tend to affect the sound more than the actual dialect, a Cantonese person speaking Mandarin still sounds very Cantonese. But since you seem to be interested.
Mandarin is now the most commonly heard but twenty years ago it was never spoken outside of mainland China. You tend to hear it spoken by newer immigrants and students, often young girls chatting noisily on the train. Unlike other dialects, it has an uneven rhythm, usually syllables are said in pairs, due to the disyllabic words, giving it a more familiar sound to English speakers. Its consonants tend to be dominated by fricative and affricate types, giving it kind of rough sound to it. It is tonal, but the tones are not as obvious to a non speaker as in other dialects. People from north China often accentuate the terminal "r", if you hear many words ending with "r" you know it is Mandarin and also where the speaker is from.
Cantonese is what you hear older, more settled immigrants speaking. Many English speaking countries have been open to HK immigration for far longer. What you hear spoken around Chinatown and in well established Chinese restaurants is likely to be Cantonese (or maybe Hokkien). It has a steady rhythm, syllables come out quickly at an even pace as the way an Italian speaker would speak, it is also very tonal giving it a tune to every sentence, almost as it is sung. Syllables also often end very sharply, rather than trailing off or rolling into an r how they do in Mandarin. To me, I tend to hear more nasal and plosive consonants.
The third is Hokkien, it is also spoken by older immigrants but is less common than Cantonese in most areas. I speak precisely zero, so I identify it by being unable to comprehend a word.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Took the words right out of my mouth.
I hadn't seen the TV show House M.D. till last week. As a physician, I had been seeing patients from time to time comment about this TV show, so finally I got around to watching a few episodes.
I didn't get it at all. This guy is supposed to be some unpersonable irascible doctor who somehow makes up for it by being such a brilliant diagnostician that other doctors are forced to come to him. WTF??? How do you pick up diagnostic clues without having the patient warm up to you so you can understand the details of his/her illness in context? Not to mention that the systematic testing and narrowing in on diagnostic possibilities, that process which on this TV show is supposed to be what makes Dr.House so brilliant, is what all of us doctors do on a daily basis anyway.
If there were a "House, I.T." equivalent, it would feature some supposedly brilliant I.T. tech support guy who refused to touch the computer. His underlings would overcome this deficiency by reading the dmesg logs to him word for word, and then House would come up with some purportedly brilliant insight like "We need to upgrade the video drivers!" at which point all would fall on their knees in fawning worship, chanting "No one else would ever have been able to figure that out!" ... I guess to be on-topic, I should talk about this device. Yes, it's nice to have a portable multilingual multimedia medical dictionary around, but this device is hardly newsworthy. Guess what? My Nokia N900 smartphone running Python, Bash and SSHd is also capable of implementing a system to overcome language barriers! It's called ... making a phone call to an interpreter service! (Also available on non-Linux smartphones, non-smart cellphones, and non-cell phones.)
Day of disillusionment. Might as well go all the way. Okay, Slashdot, tell me about how new Electronic Medical Record policies will cure my patients.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
are you hard of hearing? I still read allowed, when I'm allowed, or if my allowance has come threw I get some1 at the libraee to reed it out 2 me.
Good job he ain't 733t.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Don't watch any more, I beg you.
Watching a TV show about your profession, is like watching teaching videos which are designed to teach you how to do everything wrong.
These teaching videos are coupled with strange music, which convey emotion in places that no normal person would feel strong emotion. They portray professionals acting as drama queens, as children, incapable of performing their job.
This is quite literally part of the problem with modern society. Heck, want to marry living hell? Marry a chick that watches soaps.
Stay away. If you are in law, especially a law student, STAY AWAY from law TV shows.
Stay away.
Because it also includes a way to subdue uppity patients. "Phrazer on stun!"
Yes, you'll find people who can speak English, because it is the most commonly used language for business. And is thus widely taught in schools around the world as a required class. But get off the beaten path and the commonality of English drops. In Western Europe English is widely spoken, outside Western Europe it's not nearly so common.
So the rest of the world can teach their students two languages, the native language and English as a second language and be able to cover a majority of visitors (the commonality of English as the second language taught adds to this effect) . For the US the problem works the other way, We learn English natively and then require all our students to learn _______ as a second language to cover a majority of visitors? It's not an equal equation.
Most high schools in this country teach three common foreign languages, Spanish, French and German, a few other languages are starting to creep in but the majority of HS grads have at most one year of one of those three languages. And if we are lucky they get another year in college, allowing them to effectively ask for directions to a hospital and order a sandwich in the cafeteria, but not much more. So the original suggestion stands. If your going to live in a monolingual nation, one that happens to speak the most widely spoken and studied language in the world, you should consider learning the language.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
It is even cheaper if everyone in the U.S. would just learn English which is what the language here is.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.