.svg){kind=icon}
For our penultimate edition of Everyday Usability, we take a look into what the future of Usability could look like. What better way to improve usability than to remove the physical interface altogether and implementing voice control of medical devices?
Displayed above are three of the world's most highly-recognized voice recognition systems: on top is Apple's "Siri", on the bottom-left is IBM's "Watson, and on the bottom-right is Google's Voice Search functionality of its Android mobile operating system. Siri and Voice Search are intended to be voice control systems for mobile phones. Voice Search was the first truly functional voice command system for mobile systems, allowing for better vocal interpretation and more expansive commands. Siri, released to compete with Voice Search, is slightly more advanced in that it processes the words in a way similar to Watson.
Watson is a different beast entirely. For those of you lucky (or nerdy) enough to pay attention to Watson's appearance on Jeopardy, Watson was created to understand the nuance of the English language. Because Jeopardy and its clues are full of word play, puns, and idioms, IBM believed it would be a perfect setting to display and test Watson's ability to interpret not only the proper English language, but its colloquial idiosyncrasies as well. Watson, as YouTube can attest, handily beat the top two jeopardy players (the contestant who won the most money, and the contestant that had the longest run on the show) in February 2011. The initial use of Watson will be in healthcare to assist professionals in diagnosis, as Watson has a limitless access to knowledge and a blindingly fast means of processing it.
So for all of the above dweeb blather, what does this mean for the future of medical device development? Clearly, technology has advanced to a state where developing software to interpret language is advancing - Voice Search, Siri, and others (such as Nuance) "listen" well for mobile platforms. Watson, and to a lesser extent Siri, can interpret what users say and apply it. And, finally, Watson shows that the interpretation of the voice command can be used in bigger applications than Siri currently allows. If a healthcare professional can simply look at a device and say, "Deliver therapy at 32 degrees Celsius, 2 milliliters per minute, for a duration of 6 hours", the physical interface is removed from a device's application.
Of course, implementing voice controls to mobile phones, a far less scrutinized industry, is only the very infancy of voice control adoption among electronics and electromechanical devices. In addition, Watson's capability would be far too costly to see a wide-spread adoption of its services in the near-future of medical devices. Add to that, the manufacturer adopts a far more difficult task of validating the voice control of what the FDA would surely interpret as a "less-controlled" user interface than that of a physical interface.
But, that is why I preface this post as a glimpse into the future - I'm sure the more simplistic device manufacturers would seek clearance of voice controlled systems and, as the technology continues to mature, more complex device manufacturers may follow suit. I would think it necessary to implement some type of physical control as a risk mitigator, but that we may see a handful of devices in 10 years time that have voice control as their primary operator.
-RTK
Image Credit: Michael Dorausch on Flikr
.svg "white RQM logo")
