Presented at the 2000 APIII Conference Return to 2000 Abstract Index
DIGITAL DICTATION USING WAVE ANALYSIS SOFTWARE AND PROGRAMMABLE PERIPHERALS — A WORKING MODEL
Children's Hospital
Department of Pathology
Columbus, Ohio
Mark Luquette, MD
Background: Dictation can be stored on
magnetic tape or digitally in an audio file (.wav file,
for example). Both hand held and hands off (foot pedal operated)
dictation machines are available using cassette tapes; however,
similar stand alone digital equipment is less readily available.
Olympus Optical Co., LTD. offers a line of hand held "digital
voice recorders". The Olympus DS-150 is a hand held
device that captures audio in a highly compressed format
(.dss files). Additionally, they offer "DSS Player"
software and a transcription foot pedal that connects to
a PC through a daisy chain with a PS/2 keyboard. The player
will allow transcription of .wav files as well. Once started,
the player operates in the background, and the transcriptionist
is free to open the application into which dictation is
to be transcribed. Digital voice recorders that are foot
pedal operated; however, do not appear readily available.
I have thus configured the following system using off the
shelf software and hardware.
Model: A foot pedal operated digital dictation system was designed for use in gross dictation, assuming the user has biohazard contaminated gloved hands. It consists of a wave analysis program, a programmable foot pedal, and a programmable key pad (covered with plastic for contact with contaminated hands). The program (Cool Edit 2000, Syntrillium Software Corp., Phoenix AZ) has a menu of functions that are controllable via user selected hot keys. The key pad and foot pedal (Kinesis Corp., Bothell, WA) are programmed with the appropriate hot keys to run the player and save the .wav files. Advantages to this methodology include: ownership of the system, immediate access to the audio file, backup capabilities, portability, and the ability to manipulate the audio data. Examples of manipulation include amplification, transformation, and filtration. Cutting and pasting clips into reports can also be done. Finally, the audio wave forms are visible on the monitor as they are recorded providing feedback that the dictation is being captured and aiding in editing.
