A Speech Recognition Mechanism for Enabling Interactions Between End-Users and Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The constant evolution of software development technologies has provided new interactions mechanisms for improving the usability of software systems and increasing the productivity of healthcare professionals. In this sense, speech recognition uses methods and technologies that allow the capture and transcription of spoken language automatically. However, few studies only have used health professionals to prototype and validate graphical user interfaces with speech recognition for helping in the development of healthcare applications. This paper specifies a computational solution that makes use of speech recognition to assist healthcare professionals in recording patients’ clinical care data. Six physicians have participated in our study by prototyping activities and specifying workflow to be carried out in patient care. After that, the software architecture is specified and the proposed solution, which has been implemented based on the prototyping task performed by the end users, is detailed. To evaluate the proposed solution, we have conducted interviews with health professionals and the results showed a reduction in time and effort for recording patient information. In addition, using a quantitative approach, aspects of learnability, memorability, efficiency and satisfaction were investigated, where the proposed healthcare application tool obtained an average evaluation of 88% with respect to usability.