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<Paper uid="W06-3705">
  <Title>Language Engineering and the Pathway to Healthcare: A user-oriented view</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Some of the comments made in this position paper may seem critical, but it has not been my intention to be negative about the field.6 It has been my intention in this paper to draw attention to the following aspects of medical SLT which I believe so far have been somewhat neglected: * What is the ideal user profile for medical SLT? Should the doctor control the system, or could it be seen as a shared resource? * If the patient is also a user, devices need to be more user-friendly, taking into account cultural differences, and problems of low literacy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * This particularly applies to feedback and verification modules in the system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * Evaluation should focus on the ability of the technology to aid the completion of the task, from the perspective of both the practitioner and the patient.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Evaluation methods should not involve participants in meaningless or incomprehensible tasks (such as rating nonsensical output), nor rely on skills (such as literacy) that they may lack.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> * The pathway to healthcare involves more than the one-way doctor-patient dialogues covered by most systems. A wide range of technologies can be brought to bear on the problem.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 6In particular, it should perhaps be acknowledged that in terms of practical accomplishment we have yet to match others in the field.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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