Doctor’s appointments can be stressful enough without having to worry about being able to understand your doctor.
For the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, a visit to the doctor’s office can present obstacles that make it difficult for them to communicate with doctors and nurses and access important information about their health.
The reality is that most doctor’s offices are unprepared for their Deaf and hard-of-hearing patients, which puts the burden on them to find tools that will facilitate conversations with their doctors. When it comes to dialogues about your health, every word is important, especially when it pertains to diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up exams.
Ava is designed for these kinds of situations where it is vital to get the right information but there are no resources offered to make the environment accessible. With the help of the Ava App, you can caption everything the doctor says to you so you don’t miss out on anything, minor or important. And your conversation with your doctor can be saved on Ava so you have a record of what you discussed during the appointment for future reference.
You can get captions by simply opening the Ava app and asking the doctor to speak into your phone, but we do have a few tips for how to use Ava at the doctor’s office:
1. Ask your doctor to join you on Ava on their own phone. If your doctors or nurses have their own phone, you can invite them to join your Ava conversation and Ava will open in their phone’s browser (they don’t even have to download Ava!). Then, when they speak into their phone, you will see their captions on your phone.
2. Bring a Bluetooth microphone that is connected to your phone and hand it to any of the nurses or doctors. When they speak into the mic, captions will appear on your phone.
3. Ava works best with a strong internet connection, so we recommend using LTE, 4G, or 5G or their office’s WiFi while at your doctor’s appointment. If that’s not possible, you can use Ava in offline mode instead.
4. Set your transcripts to save automatically to access your transcript from the appointment later.
5. If you are non-voicing or prefer not to speak, you can use Ava to “speak” for you with our text-to-speech function.
6. When using Ava with doctors and nurses wearing masks, make sure that they speak close to the phone’s microphone so that Ava can “hear” and caption what they are saying through their masks.
For telehealth, our computer app Ava CC, can caption any videoconferencing tool and will help with communication during remote doctor appointments.
At Ava, we believe that you have the right to full and clear communication with your health professional. Ava can facilitate doctor and patient dialogues and reduce the stress of health appointments.
