HealthTalks - A Mobile App to Improve Health Communication and Personal Information Management

Abstract

A patient»s health literacy has a direct impact on their health, but more than a third of the USA population has "basic" or "below basic" levels of health literacy. An individual»s wellbeing is also affected by the communication with their physician, as the use of technical terminology may hinder the patient»s understanding. A patient»s ability to, later on, recall or retrieve helpful information could reduce these comprehension problems and this can be improved by a good management of personal health information. To help overcome some of these problems, we created HealthTalks, a mobile app that empowers the patients, easing their daily health tasks and self-care ability. It does so by recording the audio of a medical appointment, transcribing its dialogue, giving more information about medical concepts employed, and allowing information associated with medical appointments to be easily managed by the patient. Usability tests were conducted with elderly people, ranging from the icons used to the general user experience. Results were very positive, with users accomplishing most tasks successfully and often with the least amount of clicks. We also evaluated the speech recognition software used, Google Cloud Speech API, reaching an error rate of 12 percent in medical texts.