About MELON, a Communication Support Service for Medical Institutions

Our hospital has introduced “MELON, a communication support service for medical institutions."
This service uses a tablet to interpret conversations with foreign patients in real time. Conversations are displayed in chat format or audio output.
The service is available in 20 languages (*1).
The system keeps a history of the conversation until the end of the patient's treatment, making it possible to review conversations, or to save the data as a report. This tool also makes it possible to notice mistranslations by re-interpreting the interpreted content back into the original language.
Unlike general interpretation services, this interpretation service specializes in medical terminology so that explanations using medical terms, that are difficult to interpret, can now be explained smoothly.

*1 Languages supported are: English, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Thai, Tagalog, Nepali, Indonesian, Hindi, French, German, Italian, Malay, Burmese, Khmer, Mongolian, and Japanese.

About Interpretion

This hospital has two medical interpreters (English and Chinese) and about 20 other members of our staff who can communicate in English.

If a medical interpreter is not available, or if the patient speaks a language other than English or Chinese, we will provide the above-mentioned “MELON,” or an online interpretation service.

(Update:April 1 2022.)