A new zero-contact speech recognition system using artificial intelligence (AI) technology would help medical staff wearing personal protective equipment use computers, Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital said on Wednesday.
The hospital developed the system in collaboration with Taiwan AI Labs after it had problems dealing with a surge in people seeking services at the hospital during a domestic COVID-19 outbreak that started in May, it said.
The hospital realized that staff wearing the protective equipment had problems when performing certain tasks, such as updating people’s medical records, the hospital said.
While usually updating the records immediately when attending to a patient, doctors now took notes afterwards, which increased the risk of error, it said.
Especially staff at screening stations, who are required to wear protective suits, masks and gloves, found it difficult to accurately type on a keyboard, it added.
After hearing of the problems, Taiwan AI Labs reached out to the hospital’s emergency medicine department director, Chiu Yi-min (邱義閔), suggesting a system using AI-based speech recognition technology, the hospital said.
The newly installed system would allow staff to make changes to medical files in real time and integrate data from different sources in the hospital’s records, it said.
Hospital superintendent Wang Chih-hsi (王植熙) said that the cooperation came at the right time, as the hospital had just started implementing Big Data and AI-based technologies to provide better medical services.
The hospital would continue to collaborate with Taiwan AI Labs to train the speech recognition AI, with the aim that the technology understands all relevant details of a dialogue between doctor and patient, Wang said.
Hopefully the system can help doctors make diagnoses and assess the severity of patients’ symptoms, he said.
Taiwan AI Labs said it has since May invested considerably in COVID-19-related technology, including a social distancing app and a diagnosis software.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching