Michael J. Sammon

MACCS:: an industrial study of hands-free wireless communications for mobile healthcare workers

In many work environments there is a growing component of employees whose job tasks require them to be mobile within their local workspace. Examples of these types of workers can be found in many service and industrial markets including healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. Our goal was to see if we could address the communications needs of these mobile workers by using a small, inexpensive, wearable, hands-free audio device (a wireless headset) along with a speech interface to an intelligent agent. The market segment that we chose to target was the healthcare industry because it is ripe for the introduction of new technology that can positively influence patient care. In this paper we describe the design, implementation and real-world deployment of our Mobile Access to Converged Communications System (MACCS) that empowers mobile workers with a hands-free voice interface to manage their communications.

Evolution of a concept: from technology to end-user to enterprise

In this report we describe our experiences designing and trialing a hands-free, context-aware, mobile communications system for enterprise workers. Our concept, inspired by a new consumer technology, was designed with a heavy focus on the end-user. Through our trial we became aware of various factors in the enterprise that impacted design and deployment.

The performance of a newly developed mobile hands‐free context‐aware communications system in a hospital environment

This paper characterizes the effect of hospital noise conditions on a mobile communications system developed for a research trial in a Johns Hopkins Hospital nursing unit. The system provides an alternative to telephones and overhead paging in hopes of reducing the amount of noise on the hospital unit. Benefits of this system over current similar solutions include a completely hands free approach using a computerized voice agent and a design that addresses privacy concerns to comply with HIPAA requirements. The nurses were happy with the system and bypassed the phones and overhead paging in preference of their headsets. However, during the system trial, the effect of noise on the automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine from sources like alarms, medical equipment, and wind noise from mobile users was an issue. Utterance tests were run using a variety of different Bluetooth headsets to measure the impact of various noise sources, S/N, and noise reduction algorithms on ASR performance. Common noise reducti...