MDwAIstScheduler: A Low-Cost, Voice-Activated Device for Hands-Free Clinical Scheduling
This addresses physician burnout and inefficiency in healthcare settings by reducing administrative workload during patient encounters.
The paper tackles the problem of physicians spending excessive time on EHR tasks by introducing MDwAIstScheduler, a low-cost, voice-activated device for hands-free clinical scheduling, which automatically creates calendar events based on voice commands.
Physicians spend nearly half their workday on EHR tasks and administrative work, contributing to burnout and reducing time for direct patient care. We present MDwAIstScheduler, a low-cost, belt-worn voice assistant that allows hands-free calendar management during patient encounters. Hidden beneath a lab coat, the device avoids the eye-contact disruptions caused by visible screens or wrist-worn devices. Running on a Raspberry Pi with cloud-based speech recognition and LLM intent extraction, the system lets clinicians simply say 'Schedule a follow-up with Mr. Smith next Tuesday at 2' and automatically creates the calendar event. Our demo show-cases this end-to-end pipeline.