Can We Do Better than Gesturing? Requirements for a Digital Communication Aid to Support Non-Verbal Communication in Paediatric Emergency Care.

Providing urgent and emergency care to migrant children is often hampered or delayed. Reasons for this are language barriers when children, and their care givers, don't speak any of the languages commonly spoken in Switzerland, which include German, French, Italian, and English. By a participatory design process, we want to develop a novel image-based digital communication aid tailored to the needs of migrant patients and nurses within Swiss paediatric clinics.

Participatory Development of an Image-Based Communication Aid for Migrant Patients and Emergency Nurses.

Language barriers hamper or delay delivery of urgent and emergency care to migrant children when they or their parents don't speak any of the languages commonly spoken in Switzerland. In such situations, nurses often fall back to use ad hoc communication aids, including translation apps and visual dictionaries, to collect information about a patient's medical history. In this paper, we report on the participatory design process for a novel image-based communication aid.