Healthcare providers wear many hats in caring for patients — performing examinations, making diagnoses, developing treatment plans, and so on. But one thing that these providers cannot do is read minds. So when a patient is unable to verbally communicate due to illness, language barriers, or being placed on a ventilator, it makes all of these jobs very difficult and can lead to poor patient outcomes. A study published last year looked at how nurses communicate with non-speaking patients in critical care settings and found that there are few established standards. The authors recommended that augmentative and alternative communication techniques be adopted to facilitate better communications in these situations.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.edgeimpulse.com/blog/lost-without-translation-patient-communication-via-gesture-recognition