An Ergonomic Framework for Researching and Designing Speech Recognition Technologies in Health Care with an Emphasis on Safety

Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and speech interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent. This includes increases in and expansion of use of these technologies for supporting work in health care. Computer-based speech processing has been extensively studied and developed over decades. Speech processing tools have been fine-tuned through the work of Speech and Language Researchers. Researchers have previously and continue to describe speech processing errors in medicine. The discussion provided in this paper proposes an ergonomic framework for speech recognition to expand and further describe this view of speech processing in supporting clinical work. With this end in mind, we hope to build on previous work and emphasize the need for increased human factors involvement in this area while also facilitating the discussion of speech recognition in contexts that have been explored in the human factors domain. Human factors expertise can contribute through proactively describing and designing these critical interconnected socio-technical systems with error-tolerance in mind.