This is not something we can handle at the lab level. As a re-sult, with the app’s development having gained the wider sup-port of the university in January 2018, including the backing of the then-Chancellor and the heads of the related schools,” Takaoka explains, “we established the Sophia Medical Info venture, a first for the university, in October that year.” The demand for multilingual communication support in managing international tourists in hospitals was validated by 70% of medical facilities, in a survey reporting “the difficulty of dealing with a different language and culture” and “a lack of doctors and nurses proficient in foreign languages” as the two biggest problems. Handling cultural prohibitions and trans-lating contracts, consent agreements, and medical test results into multiple languages are among the many challenges. The cost pressures of dealing with the challenges posed by the sudden growth in foreign patients are becoming more severe, not least of which is the cost of staffing. “Making medical facilities multilingual is a key challenge, and in the past few years the government has begun to sup-port it. However, developing the infrastructure takes time. We are in the process of accelerating development to address the needs of medical facilities as soon as possible.”At this stage, SoCHAS has 13 language versions in addition to Japanese, but none are machine translations. “When it comes to the everyday conversation level of English,” explains Taka-oka, “machine translation is over 70% accurate, but in the medical field the accuracy drops below one percent. There-fore, under the supervision of doctors, we assembled around 62,000 examples of phrases from previous translations done by SoCHAS and recorded a glossary of 60,000 words.”Several versions of the product have been developed to suit different situations. In addition to dialogues in medical fa-cilities, there is a version for hospital testing that gives an in-terim diagnosis and lets the patient know which department of the medical facility to visit, and an ebook-style medical encyclopedia version for patients who want only provisional diagnoses from symptoms. “This is a function that we added because in many countries people are not accustomed to deciding which department they should visit. There is also a multilingual function for navigating hospitals. Currently there are companies that offer multilingual telephone ser-vices, and many medical facilities subscribe to such services, but minority languages take a lot of time, require advance booking, and are not available in emergency admissions. When it comes to finding one’s way around a hospital, some-times a translator is needed. With these various situations in mind, we hope to customize the app to each facility, thereby dramatically reducing the burden on staff.”At the moment, in the St. Marianna University School of Medicine joint trial, SoCHAS is being used in general prac-tice and the emergency department. Doctors and nurses are reported to be putting the app to good use. The other hospi-tals which have expressed their interest in the app hope to use it for speaking with hospitalized patients from around Asia, and communicating special orders to patients.“SoCHAS, which will help bring about a society that is toler-ant of diversity, is an innovative initiative that achieves the solidarity of Sophia’s founding philosophy, ‘Men and Women for Others, with Others;’ that is to say, the internationalism of ‘embracing ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.’ As a Catholic, I am grateful to be able to pursue research that is rooted in Christian humanism, based at Sophia.” Eventually, Takaoka hopes to apply AI, based on data ob-tained through SoCHAS, to assist with diagnosis of medical conditions.The Desire to Infuse SoCHAS with the Fraternal Spirit of Sophia’s Founding PhilosophySoCHAS facilitates com-munication for foreigners visiting Japanese hospi-tals via a simple tablet interface16Research
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