Using Sign-Language as an Input Modality for Microtask Crowdsourcing

Several input types have been developed in different technological landscapes like crowdsourcing and conversational agents. However, sign language remains one of the input types that has not been looked upon. Although numerous amount of people around the world use sign language as their primary language, there have not been many efforts to...

Enhancing the music festival experience for hearing-impaired people: Designing an inclusive visual/ tactile dance game

This thesis describes the design process to enhance the music festival experience for hearing-impaired people. This assignment was set up to make the MOJO backstage exhibition at Museum Prinsenhof Delft inclusive for hearing-impaired people. First, context mapping research with hearing-impaired and hearing festival visitors shows that...

Exploration of Deaf People’s Health Information Sources and Techniques for Information Delivery in Cape Town: A Qualitative Study for the Design and Development of a Mobile Health App

Background: Many cultural and linguistic Deaf people in South Africa face disparity when accessing health information because of social and language barriers. The number of certified South African Sign Language interpreters (SASLIs) is also insufficient to meet the demand of the Deaf population in the country. Our research team, in collaboration...

Access to Communication: Mobile communication for everyone

This master thesis shows the process of the design and implementation of new products and services for blind and deaf people. In the analysis phase interviews are done with blind and deaf to gain insight into the targetgroup regarding their needs and problems. Focus is on problems with mobile communication or that can be solved with mobile...

Automatic sign language recognition inspired by human sign perception

Automatic sign language recognition is a relatively new field of research (since ca. 1990). Its objectives are to automatically analyze sign language utterances. There are several issues within the research area that merit investigation: how to capture the utterances (cameras, magnetic sensors, instrumented gloves), how to extract interesting...

Seeing Signs: On the appearance of manual movements in gestures

This dissertation presents the results of a series of studies on the appearance of manual movements in gestures. The main goal of this research is to increase our understanding of how humans perceive signs and other gestures. Generated insights from human perception may aid the development of technology for recognizing gestures and sign language...

Sign language perception research for improving automatic sign language recognition

Current automatic sign language recognition (ASLR) seldom uses perceptual knowledge about the recognition of sign language. Using such knowledge can improve ASLR because it can give an indication which elements or phases of a sign are important for its meaning. Also, the current generation of data-driven ASLR methods has shortcomings which may...