Inclusive design for post-lingual hearing impaired people

Abstract

This is a Design for Interaction (DfI) master project of the Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) Faculty of TUDelft. In collaboration of Oorzaak (a Dutch company) and the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University, Centre for Linguistics this research has been developed. The main topics are communication between hearing impaired (HI) and hearing (H) people in a meetings context and automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Since Oorzaak is developing a tool (augmented reality (AR) spectacles) that help POD in every day’s communication. This topic is also taken into account. For this research it is important to understand that the group of hearing impaired (HI) people is divided in pre-lingual (PED): people who born deaf and did not learn the spoken language. They use sign language (SL) and post-lingual (POD): people who became deaf after the age of six which means that they learned to speak and read well. For this project special attention to PED that can read and talk well and POD people was taken into account. The main goal of this project is about improving communication between HI and H people in meetings, using automatic speech recognition technology. Accordingly, the project was divided in a research phase in which the social aspect, the needs of the user and their experiences are important insight to determine design guidelines. And a design phase which main goal was to design a product-concept that uses voice recognition technology and helps to improve communication between POD and hearing people (H) in meetings. The final concept is MEETING UP a product composed by Meeting Point (a physical device) and Meeting App (an application) is intended to improve communication between POD and H people in meetings by creating structure, order and awareness. Meeting Point a product which is placed on the center of the table is intended to provide order during meetings, its main tasks are: (1) managing the ASR system with array and wireless microphones, (2) provide WIFI connectivity with external displays (iPads and AR spectacles), (3) create order in meetings by providing feedback about who is the speaker and (4) create awareness by controlling the speaking speed and avoiding multiple speakers at the same time. On the other hand Meeting App is intended to provide more structure to the meetings by: (1) providing a chairman responsibility, (2) guiding him to create a more structured meetings by preparing the meeting before hand, creating an agenda, being aware of time, creating responsibilities for participants and providing all participants with the text of the main conclusions at the end of the meeting.