Graphical Access to Medical Expert Systems: IV. Experiments to Determine the Role of Spoken Input

Abstract

Abstract:The goal of our research is to design improved interfaces for medical expert systems. Previously, the use of graphical techniques was explored to improve the acceptance by clinicians of the user interface. Now that devices that accept spoken input are available, we wish to design interfaces that take advantage of this potentially more natural modality for interaction. To understand how clinicians might want to speak to a medical decision-support system, we carried out an experiment that simulated the availability of a spoken interface to the ONCOCIN medical expert system. ONCOCIN provides therapy advice for patients on complex cancer therapy protocols based on a description of the patient’s current medical status and laboratory-test values. In the experiment, we had oncologists present a clinical case while observing the ONCOCIN flowsheet display. A project member listened to the presentation and filled in values for the flowsheet, as well as introducing purposeful misunderstandings of the input. The results suggest that each individual developed a stereotypical grammar for communicating with the program. Our experience with the purposeful miscommunications suggests particular ways to tailor requests for repetition based on the part of the utterance that was not understood.

Navigating to Knowledge

“…During the 1980s, several point-ofcare efforts at Stanford University sought to support oncologists and other caregivers with better interfaces, better access to information and knowledge, and better decision support [43][44][45][46][47]. Lexical Technology and Stanford formed an interdisciplinary team to extend this effort by gaining a deeper understanding of point-of-care knowledge access requirements.…”

Requirements for Speech Recognition to Support Medical Documentation

“…Another means of facilitating medical documentation is offered by automated speech recognition (ASR) which has undergone rapid development in recent years. Numerous speechsupported medical applications have been developed and assessed by evaluation studies [2,3], e.g., for command control of medical devices [4], for collection of medical data [5,6], for template-based medical documentation [7,8], or as an interface for medical expert systems [9,10]. Nevertheless, ASR still has not found its way into clinical routine, mainly because of inadequate integration of these products into the specific medical documentation scenario.…”

A Continuous-speech Interface to a Decision Support System: II. An Evaluation Using a Wizard-of-Oz Experimental Paradigm

“…[13][14][15] The experimental setting requires that two computer terminals in physically distinct locations be linked to the same central processing unit and thus show the same view. Sitting at one terminal, the subject uses natural language to give commands to the system.…”

“…while Issacs et al 15 performed a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to study how users would enter data into a medical decision support system. The results of these experiments helped the developers understand the general functional requirements for speech systems in these domains, as well as how to handle specific problems, such as how to correct for misrecognized input.…”