Project Health Line Speech Interfaces For Healthcare Information

Project Health. Line Speech Interfaces For Healthcare Information Access In Underserved Communities Jahanzeb Sherwani, Rahul Tongia, Roni Rosenfeld School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Mehtab Karim, Yousuf Memon Community Health Sciences Aga Khan University

SLT 4 D Speech and Language Technology For Development Can Speech be a Compelling Technology For Under-Developed Populations? Illiteracy and semi-literacy Written and unwritten languages Accessibility Technological Economical Social

Conventional IT for Development Source: http: //www. usp. ac. fj/jica/ict_research/pfnet_case_study/research. html

Conventional IT For Development Requires field deployment of many PCs Requires Internet connectivity (broadband for multimedia) Assumes literate users Users need to learn to use computers Restricted to languages with written form Requires system maintenance and upgrades at the user end Risk of accidental PC misuse Risk of computer viruses

Speech Technologies (http: //www. usaid. gov/locations/asia_near_east/features/phil_telcom 11_03. html)

Speech Technologies Requires deployment of telephones only Already widely deployed! Literacy is not required (how do you spell Diarrhea? ) Interaction is conversational – Requires less adaptation by users Any spoken language can be supported, including switching among languages in the same session System maintained and upgraded centrally No risk of accidental PC misuse No risk of computer viruses

What Can Speech Do For Under-Served Communities? Information access Information entry Information sharing Access to services Access to automated decision-making processes …

Healthcare Information Access “Providing access to reliable health information for health workers in developing countries is potentially the single most cost-effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care” – R. Smith, British Medical Journal (1997)

Access Mechanisms speech text/images Community Health Worker text/ images/ video Health Information

Access Through Speech Interface Community Health Worker Speech System Health Information

Healthcare Delivery In Pakistan 180 million people Urdu is main language, but not first language! Acute shortage of M. D. s “Lady Health Workers” (LHWs) 100, 000 Gov’t trained, first-line health workers In-home visits, triage and liaison Children’s health, reproductive health, childbirth, … “Lady Health Visitors” (LHVs) Better trained, typically stay at clinics Nurses, M. D. s

Some Daunting Challenges Urdu Data Collection Urdu speech and acoustic models Lexicon Pronunciations Grammar and language model User training User testing Impact assessment Scale-up and dissemination Continuation funding!

The Most Daunting Of All What are the true information needs of Community Healthcare Workers? Will Community Healthcare Workers use a system such as ours? Under what conditions? Contextual Inquiry and Needs Assessment are crucial

Needs Assessment

Female-Mediated Needs Assessment

Interactions Styles For Healthcare Information Access Diagnosis help through step-by-step interview 2. Open ended question answering system 3. Searching text resources by speech We prepared mock-up demonstrations for all 3 Potential uses 1. Real-time diagnosis Offline training

Demo 1 Diagnosis Through Interview

Thank you, Microsoft! For more information, see http: //www. cs. cmu. edu/~healthline

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