There is currently a unique opportunity to examine the experiences of young people who receive a second sequential cochlear implant (SCI), after only having had 1 cochlear implant (CI) for most of their lives. Eleven young people who had opted to receive an SCI were interviewed. Interpretative phenomenological analysis resulted in the identification of 6 master themes. Most participants enjoyed...

Recently, many studies have shown that the Augmented Reality (AR), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) can be used to help people with disabilities. In this paper, we combine these technologies to make a new system, called "ASRAR", for helping deaf people. This system can take a narrator's speech and convert it into a readable text, and show the text directly o...

Many people have benefited from the flexibility that mobile phones provide. The Deaf Community currently has limited access to the mobile telephone network through text messaging systems. However, these force the user to communicate in English as opposed to the preferred language – American Sign Language (ASL). Mobile video phones have the potential to give deaf people the independence and free...

We discuss the basic ideas behind a Japanese to American Sign Language Translation System for the Japanese users, which assists Japanese Deaf people to communicate. Our discussion covers two main points. The first describes the necessity of a Sign Language Translation System. Since there is no “universal sign language” or real “international sign language,” if Deaf people should learn at least ...

Deaf sign language users, health inequities, and public health: opportunity for social justice. Introduction Inequities in health and health care have increasingly become an area for concern and action for public health professionals, clinicians, policy makers, and communities. Research has documented inequities in the prevalence of chronic diseases of subpopulations defined by education , inco...

This paper examines the social parameters surrounding the management of informed consent procedures for the parents of young deaf children for the surgical fitting of a cochlear implant ('bionic ear') to their child. Although most observers of this remarkable and well publicised medical development only see benefits in its use, the authors examine the nature of the conflict which has emerged be...

This paper presents a fast approach for marker-less FullDOF hand tracking, leveraging only depth information from a single depth camera. This system can be useful in many applications, ranging from tele-presence to remote control of robotic actuators or interaction with 3D virtual environment. We applied the proposed technology to enable remote transmission of signs from Tactile Sing Languages ...

Despite the expansion of Deaf people's use of communication technology little is published about how they use electronic communication in their social and working lives and the implications for their concepts of identity and community. Australia is an ideal research base because the use of a range of technologies is widespread there. To gain access to a wide age range of people who identify as ...

Educators of the deaf and hard-of-hearing have long viewed this population as being Hearing people without the auditory sense and used instructional approaches, especially in reading, that conformed to or paralleled approaches taken with hearing children. In this article, it is argued that a paradigmatic shift must be undertaken that views deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to be biologically...