Approaches to using a wireless mobile terminal to help severely hearing impaired people

Abstract

In this paper, new technology-adaptive approaches to using a wireless mobile terminal are presented in order to help severely hearing impaired people, which are remote human translation, remote server translation, and mobile terminal translation. The three step-by-step approaches are to adapt the evolution and feasibility of advanced computer and communication technologies. The first approach can be easily implemented but requires the involvement of human interpreters. The second and third approaches require not only speaker-independent voice recognition but also hand-writing text and sign language recognition. In particular, for the mobile terminal translation scheme, a light-weight, low-power, high-performance, small-sized mobile terminal should be provided to process the computing-centric voice, hand-writing text and sign language recognition on real-time basis. Even though this work is currently at the startup phase, as technology evolves, it will be possible to provide severely hearing impaired people with the context-aware mobile terminals that interpret voice, hand-writing text and sign language on the real-time basis. © Springer-Verlag 2004.