Design of face-to-face multilingual communication environment for illiterate people

Abstract

In the medical field, a serious problem exists with regard to communication between hospital staffs and patients. Currently, although a medical translator accompanies a patient to medical care facilities, round-the-clock or emergency support is difficult to provide due to increasing requests. The medical field has high expectations from information technology. Therefore, we have developed a support system for multilingual medical reception termed M3. We have installed our system in the Kyoto City Hospital in Japan. However, we found that our system cannot provide support to illiterate people. If an illiterate person and another person speak different languages, it is difficult the other person to communicate face to face with the illiterate person while explaining the meaning of texts shown on the display of the support system. This is one of the problems specific to the multilingual communication. There is a need to solve this problem. Therefore, we have developed a method to provide support to illiterate people engaging in multilingual face-to-face communication. We use a text-to-speech function implemented using a selector switch to provide support to illiterate people in performing operations using a touch screen. We performed an experiment to examine the effect of the proposed method. The results of the experiment are as follows. (1) From the results of the questionnaire, we find that the subjects are able to operate the selector switch easily. Therefore, we conclude that the method using the selector switch has little effect on the operation of the system. (2) Retrieval time using the text-to-speech function is five times that using the normal operation. We need to consider a structure that can retrieve the required information easily if many readings of texts are required. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.