An Assistive Technology Framework for Communication with Hearing Impaired Persons

Abstract

This paper presents a novel assistive technology framework which provides an interface to support communication between hearing impaired person and ordinary person over the mobile phone. It converts the ordinary person's voice to text and afterward text to tactile feedback at the hearing impaired person’s end. The Morse Code tactile feedback have been identified as the most appropriate method for providing the tactile feedback at the hearing impaired person’s end, since it is a standard code which helps persons with impairments. The work addresses the challenge of using a set of Morse Code shorthand vibration patterns to translate the whole text message to tactile feedback to provide a simple, efficient and synchronous communication, rather than vibrating each and every character in text using
Morse Code characters. The user evaluation found that, most hearing impaired persons’ preferred method of conversation is the Morse Code shorthand forms with two or three character length rather than reading the entire text message. Due to less perspicuity of a hearing impaired person’s voice, the study comes up with the conversion of the hearing impaired persons’ voice to text and sends it to the ordinary person synchronously as a voice reply. The results of the evaluation experiment shows that the assistive technology framework facilitates by improving the quality of communication of hearing impaired persons over a mobile device.