Modelling a Good Delivery of Bad News

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

The development of soft skills and specifically good delivery of bad news gain increasing importance in all healthcare disciplines. These skills improve the communication between healthcare professionals, patients and their families. Good delivery of bad news is defined and taught using qualitative and subjective means. Quantitative voice and language attributes could provide an automated practice and education tool for healthcare professionals and improve their delivery of bad news. We investigated acoustic and verbal features in a database recorded by healthcare professional simulating delivery of bad news. The recordings were rated by other healthcare professionals and labelled as 'good' or 'bad'. Prosodic features were extracted directly from the recordings and provided speech tone attributes. Automated speech recognition was applied to compute the speech pace feature. A bidirectional long short term memory network was trained on the features and labels. The classification model trained on the tone features yielded an accuracy of 81.8%. The model trained on the combined tone and pace features yielded an accuracy of 90.0%. This proof of concept implies a feasibility for a fully automated practice tool that could quantify good delivery attributes and train and improve the skills of healthcare professionals in their delivery of bad news.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE 9th International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ISCHI 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages224-227
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781665401326
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event9th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ISCHI 2021 - Virtual, Victoria, Canada
Duration: 9 Aug 202112 Aug 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2021 IEEE 9th International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ISCHI 2021

Conference

Conference9th IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ISCHI 2021
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVirtual, Victoria
Period9/08/2112/08/21

Keywords

  • Educating message delivery
  • Healthcare communication
  • Long-short term memory network
  • Soft skills
  • Speech analytics
  • Speech rate
  • Speech tone

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