With the emergence of new technologies, the surgical working environment becomes increasingly complex and comprises many medical devices that have to be taken cared of. However, the goal is to reduce the workload of the surgical team to allow them to fully focus on the actual surgical procedure. Therefore, new strategies are needed to keep the working environment manageable. Existing research projects in the field of intelligent medical environments mostly concentrate on workflow modeling or single smart features rather than building up a complete intelligent environment. In this article, we present the concept of intelligent digital assistance for clinical operating rooms (IDACO), providing the surgeon assistance in many different situations before and during an ongoing procedure using natural spoken language. The speech interface enables the surgeon to concentrate on the surgery and control the technical environment at the same time, without taking care of how to interact with the system. Furthermore, the system observes the context of the surgery and controls several devices autonomously at the appropriate time during the procedure.Keywords: intelligent operating assistance; natural spoken language; operating room of the future (ORF); surgical environment; voice interaction system.
In this work, we investigate whether the cultural idiosyncrasies found in humanhuman interaction may be transferred to human-computer interaction. With the aim of designing a culture-sensitive dialogue system, we designed a user study creating a dialogue in a domain that has the potential capacity to reveal cultural differences. The dialogue contains different options for the system output according to cultural differences. We conducted a survey among Germans and Japanese to investigate whether the supposed differences may be applied in human-computer interaction. Our results show that there are indeed differences, but not all results are consistent with the cultural models.
In this work, we present the development and evaluation of a social companion and conversation partner for the special user group of elderly. With the aim of designing a user-adaptive system, we responded to the desires of the elderly which have been identified during various interviews and created a companion which talks and listens to the elderly users. Moreover, we conducted a user study with a small group of retired seniors living at home or in a nursing home. The results show that our companion and its dialogue were perceived very positively and that a social companion and conversation partner is indeed in demand by lonely seniors.
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