System construction supporting communication with foreign doctors using onomatopoeia expressing pains

In medical interviews, Japanese patients often use onomatopoeia such as “zuki-zuki” and “chiku-chiku” to express their pains or medical conditions. However, onomatopoeia varies from language to language, and Japanese onomatopoeia cannot be used to express their pains in medical interviews with foreign doctors. So in this study, we constructed a system which supports communication between Japanese patients and foreign doctors by evaluating meanings expressed by onomatopoeia. When a user inputs Japanese onomatopoeia, our system refers to the database, and estimates the relationships between the sounds used in the onomatopoeia and meanings expressed by multilingual 35 rating scales such as “sharp-dull”, “strong-weak”, and “momentary-continuous”.