Data entry has become the bottleneck of many scientific applications designed to collect and manage information related to experimental studies. In animal drug toxicology studies, this is true because of the need to collect data in hands-busy or eyes-busy environments. The objective of this proposal is the continued design of a voice-driven computer system to enable hands-free and eyes-free collection of data related to animal drug toxicology studies. Specifically, we intend to develop a voice-driven computer workstation that can be used for the collection of histopathology, necropsy, and in-life data. The innovative use of speech recognition and speech response technology will provide pathologists and technicians with hands-free and eyes-free operation during animal handling, necropsy, and microscopic exams. For increased commercial viability, the system will employ a scalable architecture and support multiple hardware environments. This type of automation at the source of data collection could be used to greatly reduce the data validation costs associated with bringing new drugs to market. This second phase of research will focus on completing hardware integration, software development, validation, and field testing of the proposed system.
An integrated, voice-driven system for data collection, management, and reporting would provide increased productivity to the more than 1000 commercial and government laboratories involved in chemical, drug, cancer, or other types of research where large volumes of animal drug toxicology data must be processed.
