As seen so far, the four chosen mobile applications described in addition to the BabelDr web application are all quite different from one another. Three of these applications offer a large number of languages and most of them subdivide the sentences into their respective domains, sometimes also in subdomain branches.
The mobile applications are mostly (or sometimes just only) available on the Apple iPhones rather than on Android phones. It would obviously be useful to target both in order to accommodate more users.
Almost all the applications provide pre-translated sentences, making the translation more accurate compared to live machine translation systems.
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of most applications is often not so user-friendly, as there are no icons or pictures to help. This is also the case with BabelDr, which lacks subdomains and has no images representing the domains.
28 Some applications use acronyms in order to make some medical expressions shorter, which can be useful for a doctor who knows them well. However, if there is only one source language and the doctor did not study medicine in that language, navigating among acronyms would certainly be difficult.
Not all applications allow the creation of a history report of the already used sentences. The absence of this feature could lead the doctor to lose track of the consultation and forget what he has already asked (or not asked yet) the patient. This increases the risk of making mistakes if no separate notes are taken. As designed in BabelDr, it is certainly a big advantage to have a history generated automatically for the benefit of the doctor. It could be useful to add a button to clear the history in a faster way.
Concerning the audio output, some application’s audio quality can be disputable. In contrast, BabelDr only uses validated audio, produced either by text to speech for languages where it is available (Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Spanish) or by human recordings (Albanian, Tigrinya).
Currently a custom synthetic voice is being developed for the Albanian language. A study shows that 60 translations (prompts) asserted by 12 Albanian native speakers increased in quality thanks to tools like Tacotron 2 (Tsourakis, Troque, Gerlach, Bouillon, & Spechbach, 2020).
Nevertheless, the most important functionality of any of those applications, and also the purpose these applications were designed for in the first place (apart from the linguistic aspects) is to enable the doctor to find a sentence quickly. When testing all these applications, one of the first observations was that it is a challenge to find a sentence. Most applications have domains, but either no or too many subdomains. Even a doctor, in contrast to a random user, might have difficulties to understand quickly these classification branches.
In emergency services especially, doctors do not have time to waste searching for a question to ask. Hence, the doctor needs a tool that is simple enough to be used, yet sufficiently extensive to be useful. This leads us to assert that the classification of domains, subdomains and sentences should follow logic guidelines similar to practical medical standard procedures the doctor is used to. In particular, since desired sentences have to be found quickly, there should not be too many sentences within a subdomain.
29 Table 1 compares the main aspects of all applications discussed before. However, to simplify this document, features of the new MobileDr were already added, Chapter 2 will later present the MobileDr web application.
Table 1 – 20 aspects compared in the 6 applications. Signs legend: ✓stands for “has this aspect”,✗ for “lacks of this aspect” and✗(✓)suggests the aspect was “planned to be added later”.
It is worth mentioning that indications about a future addition of English as a source language are present in the BabelDr source code. This means the “change source language” aspect is currently under development. In MobileDr, the wish to implement a “word search tool” has been expressed, but the deadline to finish the Master thesis did not allow for its development to start. That is why it is referred to as “planned to be added later”.
30 To summarize, the following characteristics are compared in Table 2 for all 6 chosen applications: number of domains, subdomains, languages each application offers, and most notably the languages present uniquely in each application (see Table 2).
Care to
Table 2 – Other compared aspects in all six applications, as additional information in numbers.
Three of the applications offer a large number of languages. Here are listed all languages proposed in each application. Languages which are present only in one application (unique languages) and not in the others are in blue:
Care to Translate: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Kurmanji, Lule Sami, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian/Farsi, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Somali (Somalia), Sorani, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkish
Canopy Speak: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Filipino, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese
MediBabble Translator: English, Spanish (others are somehow not downloadable)
MedTranslate: Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil, Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
BabelDr + MobileDr: Albanian, Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Spanish, Swiss sign language, Tigrinya
31 Care to Translate and MedTranslate are offering the most languages and are also the ones having the most of unique languages. BabelDr is unique in its capability to allow the communication with deaf people, which are about 10’000 in Switzerland (SGB-FSS, 2016). A paper describing the translation methodology (into videos with a person doing the signs) and translation issues with medical speech with the Swiss sign language has been published (Strasly et al., 2018).