Medical Translator Used Successfully 98
saskboy writes "Translations of medical questions posed by doctors to their patients were provided by a new Canadian designed computer called MedBridge. "Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, French, and Russian," are some of the languages the MedBridge can work with. CBC reports, "If a patient is deaf, the system can also translate into American Sign Language using video. The MedBridge system is already in use at hospitals in New York, Toronto and Halifax." Pretranslated questions are stored in the computer and the doctor chooses from the list of questions to ask. It's not quite a Universal Translator, but it should improve doctor-patient communication."
Re:In other news... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Another Roadblock (Score:1)
Application? (Score:2)
It looks useful on paper, but in reality I think it will just be an extra expense for very little return.
Re:Application? (Score:2)
For most clinics, it probably is more along the lines of "cool toy" than "useful tool" but with the number of languages it supports, I could see it being more useful in a downtown clinic in a big city like New York when someone who speaks Chinese comes in and all you've got on hand is English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Personally, I'm surprised that the
Re:Application? (Score:2)
Re:Application? (Score:1)
Re:Application? (Score:2)
Re:Application? (Score:2)
A patient suffering from a STD may well withhold embarassing information about his symptoms if forced to translate through a relative.
Absolutely, nobody likes to talk about Chlamydia Psittaci (parrot fever) [medhelp.org].
Re:Application? (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's expense is a drawback, then several rural hospitals could get one together, and then when someone made an appointment and requested translation services, they could make sure it was at the right hospital on the right day.
This is a good practical application of translation software in a situation with clear context and
Re:Application? (Score:2)
English
French
Italian
Spanish
Greek
Russian
Persian
Yiddish
Vietnamese
There are two guys that speak Farsi, but I haven't heard them talk to each other in anything but English.
We're a small segment of the population. Those same people speak English with varying degrees of fluency. Good luck finding a practice that has doctors who speak all those languages
Re:Application? (Score:2)
If you're looking for applications outside of Canada, think of the Red Cross and thier emergency relief efforts. If an earthquake happens in Pakistan would you o
Re:Application? (Score:2)
Re:Application? (Score:2)
Re:Application? (Score:1)
Re:Application? (Score:2)
Some clinics may happen to have doctors and nurses who speak the languages of their clientele, but communication between patients and medical staff is a significant problem in the United States. I had a post [upenn.edu] about this on Language Log a while back that contains links to other information. There are large numbers of patients who do not speak English well and cannot make use of a clinic whose staff speak their language. That may be because they speak a language that is not well enough represented in the US.
Application: unmet American health needs (Score:2)
To meet their needs for major surgery and so forth, they will be going to other countries with more rational health care services. Some doctors in these pl
Re:Application? (Score:1)
Many hospitals, especially in larger cities, already have paid medical translators on hand - so the need for this type of service is pre-established.
Furthermore, human translators are highly expensive (salary, training, benefits,
Re:Application? (Score:1)
If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:1)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:1)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
(This is what we were taught in
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems sad to me, though. Imagine being that completely locked out of our culture's discourse... I can imagine being deaf, and I can imagine being illiterate, but I can not imagine being both at the same time.
m-
Re:If the patient is deaf.... (Score:2)
The reason for the illiteracy has mostly to do with the fact that ASL is not English with signs (that would be Signed Exact English SEE) but is in fact a completely distinct language with it's own grammatical structure. For a deaf person to sign ASL and read English is like me speaking and thinking in English and reading in Hindi (or other language where the grammatical structure is significantly different from English).
The more amazing thing is so many deaf people are so capably bi-lingual.
Rx/Tx (Score:2)
Whaaat (Score:2)
Sure that's impressive but so is .... (Score:2)
Your dog wants a cure for cancer now.
Re:Sure that's impressive but so is .... (Score:2)
Re:They got lucky (Score:2)
Understanding doesn't mean Comprehension (Score:2)
No Really... (Score:1)
Re:No Really... (Score:3, Funny)
The real question.. (Score:1)
Reminds me ... (Score:3, Informative)
They had a live translation service that worked through a "red phone" (it wasn't really red, but it was a dedicated, pick-up-to-talk phone) that connected to a bank of live translators. You picked up the phone and entered codes for what languages you wanted it to translate to and from, say English to Catalan, and it would route you to an operator that could do that translation. Then the patient picked up the other handset, or you put it on speaker, and away you went. I assume the hospital got a fat bill at the end of the month for every use. I always thought this was a pretty slick system, because the translators could be anywhere. I don't know how they handled it in reality, but I had visions of operators sitting around their kitchens or in small callcenters worldwide, with the computer routing them calls when ones in languages whenever they were available.
Granted, I never saw anyone actually use this system, so I can't vouch for it in practice. But conceptually it struck me as being pretty cool.
The point that TFA makes about colloquialisms is right on, however. Even a human translator doesn't take this all out. A good story is one I heard from an EMT friend of mine. He got called to the scene of an older person who had lost consciousness and was unresponsive. When there, he tried to get a history from the wife: she kept saying "He fell out! He just fell out!" And nobody had any idea what she meant. Fell out of where? Of a window? Of a car? Of his chair? Was there a possible head injury? The possibilities were endless.
Turns out, "falling out" is apparently a direct translation of the Quebecois term for "passing out" or "fainting." The lady was just stating the obvious -- the guy had passed out. To the woman, it made perfect sense, but to the EMTs, it didn't. And this was with two people, in person, speaking the same language, with one native speaker and one very competent second-language speaker. Even with human translators, unless you selected them not only for languages, but also for dialect and regionalisms, I could see this being a big problem. (And potentially a lot more serious than my example.) With a machine, the number of problems must skyrocket.
That said, I still think it's a neat development, and I'm sure it'll be an asset for hospitals in areas where the staff can't keep up with the diverse and ever-changing language requirements of their patients.
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:1)
The device is geared for yes/no questions,
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2)
(A/D conversion and fuzzy matching)
"OTTERS. GO. WILD. IN. MY. PANTS."
Family interpretting (Score:2)
When I was taking ASL courses, our teacher shared her own story about that. Due to vagaraies of genetics and the like, both she and her grandmother were deaf and had therefore learned sign language. The rest of the family, for whatever reason, had not. The
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2)
Apparently, the doctor wanted the patient to scootch her butt over a little on the bed. Because of the large number of Columbians working at the hospital, he'd picked up some Spanish, and was trying it out.
Unfortunately, he didn't realize just *what kind* of language he'd picked up, and wou
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2)
e.g.,
"I am thirsty."
"I want to phone home."
"My ____ hurts."
I've often thought about a software alternative but it always seems too inconvenient and a barrier to those who aren't too technical in the first place.
Usually this sheet
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me ... (Score:2)
If you want another example, I have one from Norway/Sweden. We speak a rather similar language, and many Swedish nurses come to work in Norway. One word that has created some interesting fuck-ups is "glasögon" - "glassøye" (swedish and norwegian respectively). In english, eyeglasses vs glass eye. Miiiiiinor difference.
Do we have patois to english? (Score:1)
And don't get me started on "high blood". High blood WHAT? Pressure, sugar, alcohol, ARRRGGH . .
Rural North Florida Paramedic (volunteer)
Geekery unfortunately pays the bills so much better
Why not go all the way... (Score:2)
What happened to those expert systems that seemed so promising in the 70s and 80s? I don't believe a doctor can weigh up the range of symptoms that a patient might have, and the even bigger range of symptoms that a patient doesn't have, more reliably than a machine, in order to make an assessment of the probability of the patient having any particular disease. MYCIN [hw.ac.uk] is one that comes to mind but there were others. I was under the impression that they had pe
Re:Why not go all the way... (Score:2)
legal liabilities... (Score:2)
who do you sue if an expert system advises something that has an adverse event?
Deaf people can't read? (Score:1)
which also allows the patients to see the words on the screen in their own language.
If a patient is deaf, the system can also translate into American Sign Language using video.
What's the point of video sign language? You could just read the words off the screen... seems a trifle pointless.
And does this system just show text, or can it actually pronounce it? (This could be an issue in countries where the literacy rate isn't too high, if say US doctors are doing disaster relief.)
Re:Deaf people can't read? (Score:2)
Honestly I dont think this syste
Re:Deaf people can't read? (Score:2)
But... (Score:2)
other techniques (Score:2)
Re:other techniques (Score:2)
Better then nothing (Score:2)
I've also been an Anglophone living in rural Quebec using local medical facilities, where the medical staff was not at all comfortable working in English (and please not the ol
Metropolitan Cities (Score:1)
I havent RTFA, but the last I heard (a week ago
Re:Metropolitan Cities (Score:2)
"Remove your gitch and show me your trouser trout" might not be in the list for the doctor to choose though.
medicine has a different vocabulary (Score:2)
a medical translater must not only translate the exact word, but mus
Ever been to a hospital overseas? (Score:2)
How many people here have actually been to a hospital overseas, where the odds of someone speaking your language well enough for you to understand are quite slim, or perhaps in a country where your mastery of the language is questionable at best? I have, and let me tell you - it's no fun. The usual jumpiness that accompanies any trip to the hospital is magnified about 10 fold. I would have loved to have access to a device like this one. It's not
why (Score:1)
Maritime flag signals: Mike Kilo Foxtrot (Score:2)
Mike Kilo Foxtrot is one that comes to mind...
The link (Score:2)
MKF [softtechsys.com]
learning the language (Score:1)
Re:learning the language (Score:2)
Actual translators already exist (Score:2)
That sounds like just a point-and-click set of canned questions and multiple choice responses. There are better things.
Speech-to-speech translators and universal dictionaries are getting pretty good these days. These guys [ectaco.com] make one.
halifax (Score:1)
Yeah, this'll work (Score:1)
Better....but not perfect. (Score:1)
gotta be better than babelfish ... (Score:2)
Restricting the syntax to the domain of medical terms makes the job a whole lot easier, and would eliminate oodles of ambiguities.
already been done (Score:1)
Health Insurance... No Wonder! (Score:1)
It is no wonder though, with all the technology being pushed into the medical field, how expensive health insurance has gotten. New technology like this sounds great, but is never around long enough to turn a profit, and is outdated within a week. It is one of those cases where there may be an advantage to technological gr
Candadian/American Translator (Score:2)
Like I've said before... (Score:1)