Mobile Medical Translation App (Interpretation in fact)

Today I found this video and I really needed to share it.
This remember me what I read a few years ago: major innovations in the language industry come from people/companies outside the industry.

In my opinion, the most interesting thing about this App is that it's completely free and it was born from a real problem: how to communicate with patients who speak languages other than English? The Mobile Medical Translation App, called MediBabble, made its debut in last April and it has been very successful until now.

As 90% of medical diagnosis come from medical history, the communication between a medical provider and their patients is critical. Nowadays, large cities around the world have multicultural population with different backgrounds, which is a challenge for medical providers.

MediBabble uses a symptom-based approach that gathers information about the current complaint, such as cough. Then it uses closed-ended questions to elicit yes/no answers or gestures from the patient, who can then point to certain body parts or dates on a calendar, for example, to convey the date a problem began.

In this way, MediBable helps practitioners to communicate with their patients and help them to make a diagnosis.

As MediBabble considers patient safety a primary concern, all of the app’s phrases were written and reviewed by the team for accuracy and cultural appropriateness. The team includes UCSF faculty, doctors and medical translators.

One of the creators mentioned that MediBabble used medical interpreters to record the voices available in the App (probably the same medical "translators" included in the team). Interestingly, all interpreters are females because apparently their voices were clearer than male ones.

MediBabble is available in five languages at the moment: Russian, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin and Haitian Creole. The next five languages to be added are French, German, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic.

Not all is new here. Guess who founded the project? Apple, Google and Twitter. Outside players who are interested in innovation.

I really hope we start innovating more INSIDE the language industry. We need to remember that our main purpose (to be relevant in our society) is to communicate! And the way people communicate is changing very quickly so why don't change our way of doing things?

People need more information in less time and in a more affordable way. And this doesn't mean to "charge less" for what we do now. That is easy and rather stupid. :-)

In my opinion, we need to understand that we are here to serve first (i.e. communicate), charge second. We need to help (really help!) to be relevant in our changing world.