I have been asked to contribute this guest editorial to provide further perspective on the health care experience of elderly deaf patients reported in the article by Witte and Kuzel in this issue. l Accordingly, this editorial explores the availability and problems of medical care for the elderly Deaf in Richmond, Va, area as well as comments on health care delivery to the Deaf population at la...

Hearing loss is an economically and socially important cause of human morbidity. It is estimated that at least 20% of the population develop clinically significant hearing loss at some time during their lives. Hereditary hearing loss occurs in approximately 1/2000 newborns. During the past five years, dramatic advances have been made in the mapping of more than 60 loci for non-syndromic deafnes...

This paper presents a characterization of interaction phenomena among members of communities aimed at deaf people in an online social network system, namely Orkut. The results revealed that members of deaf communities are tighter than members of other communities. However, analysis of the interface indicates that it does not always address their specific needs.

This paper presents a prototype English-ToIndian Sign Language (henceforth called, ISL) machine translation system. The system can be used to disseminate information to more than 1.5 million deaf people in India. Further, considering such a low literacy rate among the deaf population in India [Vasishta, Woodward and Santis (1998)], the system can also be used as an educational tool to learn ISL.

Hearing loss is an economically and socially important cause of human morbidity. It is estimated that at least 20% of the population develop clinically significant hearing loss at some time during their lives. Hereditary hearing loss occurs in approximately 1/2000 newborns. During the past five years, dramatic advances have been made in the mapping of more than 60 loci for non-syndromic deafnes...