Speech technologies against occupational diseases

Speech technologies against occupational diseases

How do computer occupational diseases occur?

In this article we analyze how the use of modern speech technologies, in particular, dictation and automatic transcription software help to avoid the computer occupational diseases.
The increase of the role of computers in everyday human life and work activities, in addition to great benefits, brings some professional diseases, which creep unnoticed, and one day the serious dangers appear for the quality of human life and activities.
Pain in the joints of the hand, numbness, cold or soreness in the fingers, discomfort in hands, dry eye syndrome, reduced visual acuity, “text neck”, “smartphone finger”, prolonged pain in the neck, frequent headache, insomnia and irritability and many other diseases become a permanent companion of man.

What to do? Abandon all work on the computer?
Of course, this is impossible. A modern human workplace cannot be imagined without computers.
First, we list the main factors that have negative impact on human health when working in a computer.
As with any other sedentary work, when the user's body remains in the same position for a long time, a large static load is created on the spine and some muscle groups , and this leads to disruption of normal blood circulation in the limbs and pelvis. Since the main channel for receiving information from a PC is the monitor, the load on the visual system inevitably increases. With long-term work with traditional input devices (keyboard and mouse) the user makes thousands of finger movements, which ultimately leads to squeezing of the median nerve of the hand.
Therefore, sedentary work, long-time typing on the keyboard, large load on the visual system are the main culprits of the occurrence of occupational diseases associated with computers.
If we exclude all or at least some of these factors, then we can reduce the risk of occupational diseases.

Voicedocs Speech Technologies to Protect Your Health

Software applications Developed by Voicedocs based on their own speech technologies help you to get rid of sedentary work, long viewing the monitor and long typing on the keyboard.
How does it take place?
In the example of two applications, Voicedocs Dictate (https://voicedocs.com/en/dictate) and Voicedocs Transcriber (https://voicedocs.com/en/transcriber), we will analyze how speech technologies help avoiding the occupational diseases associated with the use of computers.
Note that these applications are similar in purpose: both applications convert speech to text. The first converts live speech into text, but the second pre-recorded speech, i.e. speech in audio / video files.

Voicedocs Dictate

Work on the computer is often associated with the preparation of documents that are typed on the keyboard. Instead of typing on the keyboard, you can dictate to the microphone, and the text is instantly transferred to your computer.
So, Voicedocs Dictate speeds up text input and protects your nerves, hands, and fingers from overloading.
Different from other applications of the same kind, Voicedocs Dictate use a mobile phone instead of microphone. This is the undeniable advantage of our dictation app over other similar applications.
You can dictate the text to your mobile phone at home, while walking, at public transport stops and inside the transport, on the road, i.e. where you have a free minute. That is, for the dictation of the text does not require anything other than a mobile phone (connected to the Internet). And when it’s available, you can transfer text to your computer.
Thus, the Voicedocs Dictate Application frees you from sedentary work, from viewing the monitor, from typing on keyboard, and as a result protects you from occupational diseases.

Voicedocs Automatic Transcriber

Sometimes you need to transcribe pre-recorded speech to text. Audio records of interviews, medical examinations, lectures, lawsuits and so on, must be transcribed to text.
In such cases, speech is first recorded on a Dictaphone (mobile phone, CD, etc.), and then is transcribed to text. This is a very time consuming and tedious process (read the article at: https://voicedocs.com/de/blog/schnelle-transkription ).
Transcriber listens to the audio track, stops the sound, then goes to a text editor (eg MS Word), writes the text, then goes back to the player, presses the play button, listens to the next track, stops the player again, goes to the editor, writes the text and so on. Because of such monotonous work, the person gets tired quickly and an audio file of only 1-1.5 hours can be transcribed within a working day.
Such work at the computer can be a source of occupational diseases.
Voicedocs Transcriber automatically transcribes audio to text and frees you from this tedious work.
The details about how to use Voicedocs Transcriber can be found here: https://voicedocs.com/transcriber