Speech Technology and Text Mining in Medicine and Health Care

This book offers an overview of some recent advances in the Computational Bioacoustics methods and technology. In the focus of discussion is the pursuit of scalability, which would facilitate real-world applications of different scope and purpose, such as wildlife monitoring, biodiversity assessment, pest population control, and monitoring the spread of disease transmitting mosquitoes. The various tasks of Computational Bioacoustics are described and a wide range of audio parameterization and recognition tasks related to the automated recognition of species and sound events is discussed. Many of the Computational Bioacoustics methods were originally developed for the needs of speech, audio, or image processing, and afterwards were adapted to the requirements of automated acoustic recognition of species, or were elaborated further to address the challenges of real-world operation in 24/7 mode. The interested reader is encouraged to follow the numerous references and links to web resources for further information and insights. This book is addressed to Software Engineers, IT experts, Computer Science researchers, Bioacousticians, and other practitioners concerned with the creation of new tools and services, aimed at enhancing the technological support to Computational Bioacoustics applications.

• Examines various speech technologies deployed in healthcare service robots to maximize the robot's ability to interpret user input.
• Demonstrates how robot anthropomorphic features and etiquette in behavior promotes user-positive emotions, acceptance of robots, and compliance with robot requests.
• Analyzes how multimodal medical-service robots and other cyber-physical systems can reduce mistakes and mishaps in the operating room.
• Evaluates various input methods for improving acceptance of robots in the older adult population.
• Presents case studies of cognitively and socially engaging robots in the long-term care setting for helping older adults with activities of daily living and in the pediatric setting for helping children with autism spectrum conditions and metabolic disorders.

Speech and Automata in Health Care forges new ground by closely analyzing how three separate disciplines - speech technology, robotics, and medical/surgical/assistive care - intersect with one another, resulting in an innovative way of diagnosing and treating both juvenile and adult illnesses and conditions. This includes the use of speech-enabled robotics to help the elderly population cope with common problems associated with aging caused by the diminution in their sensory, auditory and motor capabilities. By examining the emerging nexus of speech, automata, and health care, the authors demonstrate the exciting potential of automata, both speech-driven and multimodal, to affect the healthcare delivery system so that it better meets the needs of the populations it serves. This book provides both empirical research findings and incisive literature reviews that demonstrate some of the more novel uses of speech-enabled and multimodal automata in the operating room, hospital ward, long-term care facility, and in the home. Studies backed by major universities, research institutes, and by EU-funded collaborative projects are debuted in this volume.

This volume provides a wealth of timely material for industrial engineers, speech scientists, computational linguists, and for signal processing and intelligent systems design experts.

Topics include:

• Spoken Interaction with Healthcare Robots
• Service Robot Feature Effects on Patient Acceptance/Emotional Response
• Designing Embodied and Virtual Agents for the Operating Room
• The Emerging Role of Robotics for Personal Health Management in the Older-Adult Population
• Why Input Methods for Robots that Serve the Older Adult Are Critical for Usability
• Socially and Cognitively Engaging Robots in the Long-Term Care Setting
• Voice-Enabled Assistive Robots for Managing Autism Spectrum Conditions
• ASR and TTS for Voice-Controlled Robot Interactions in Treating Children with Metabolic Disorders

This book draws on the recent remarkable advances in speech and language processing: advances that have moved speech technology beyond basic applications such as medical dictation and telephone self-service to increasingly sophisticated and clinically significant applications aimed at complex speech and language disorders. The book provides an introduction to the basic elements of speech and natural language processing technology, and illustrates their clinical potential by reviewing speech technology software currently in use for disorders such as autism and aphasia. The discussion is informed by the authors' own experiences in developing and investigating speech technology applications for these populations. Topics include detailed examples of speech and language technologies in both remediative and assistive applications, overviews of a number of current applications, and a checklist of criteria for selecting the most appropriate applications for particular user needs.

This book will be of benefit to four audiences: application developers who are looking to apply these technologies; clinicians who are looking for software that may be of value to their clients; students of speech-language pathology and application development; and finally, people with speech and language disorders and their friends and family members.

• Includes Text Mining and Natural Language Processing Methods for extracting information from electronic health records and biomedical literature.
• Analyzes text analytic tools for new media such as online forums, social media posts, tweets and video sharing.
• Demonstrates how to use speech and audio technologies for improving access to online content for the visually impaired.

Text Mining of Web-Based Medical Content examines various approaches to deriving high quality information from online biomedical literature, electronic health records, query search terms, social media posts and tweets. Using some of the latest empirical methods of knowledge extraction, the authors show how online content, generated by both professionals and laypersons, can be mined for valuable information about disease processes, adverse drug reactions not captured during clinical trials, and tropical fever outbreaks. Additionally, the authors show how to perform infromation extraction on a hospital intranet, how to build a social media search engine to glean information about patients' own experiences interacting with healthcare professionals, and how to improve access to online health information.

This volume provides a wealth of timely material for health informatic professionals and machine learning, data mining, and natural language researchers.

Topics in this book include:
• Clinical Documents in Electronic Health Records
• Summarization Techniques for Online Health Data
• Natural Language Processing for Text Mining
• Query Expansion Techniques for Tweets
• Online Video Data Retrieval of Health-Related Videos
• Dengue Fever Outbreaks
• Bioemergencies and Social Media Posts
• Speech-based Disease Screening for Malaria, Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and Lassa Fever
• Audio Access to Online Video Data for the Visually Impaired

This book provides the reader with empirical findings on innovative signal processing approaches to detecting pathologies in infant cries, by comparing new technological approaches to standard ones. The contributors examine novel approaches to machine adaptation to dysarthric speech.