Visualization of Spoken Language for Deaf People

The academic achievement of the deaf is related to the difficulty in communication, not to the cognitive abilities. Without communication, their needs are generally misinterpreted and ignored. Accumulated years of misunderstanding will impair their academic as well as social success. Since the hearing world uses spoken language to communicate, the deaf are commonly isolated because they can use only sign language and lip-reading. The deaf ultimately go to special need schools where they can find a community with common ground and they can use sign language in their daily conversation. The special need schools are either primary or secondary ones, which offer free education to all children. However, special need schools often cannot offer the same broad curriculum as the general schools do. Therefore, in this work, a system that can support the deaf in general education is proposed. The system operates based on the cooperation between smart devices (including mobile devices) and wearable devices. The performance of the system has been validated based on a real test bed. The obtained results show that the system can support the deaf in realtime communication.