using sign language on mobile
September 5, 2008 at 5:05 am Leave a comment
A research group at the University of Washington has demonstrated a software that enables the hearing impaired to effectively communicate via sign language over mobile phones. Science Daily reports that the Mobile ASL project aims to develop a real time video compression scheme keeping in view existing mobile network bandwidth constraints. By facilitating the display of a person’s face and hands in high resolution, and the background in low resolution, it optimizes data transmission.
For mobile communication, deaf people now communicate by cell phone using text messages. “But the point is you want to be able to communicate in your native language,” Riskin said. “For deaf people that’s Sign Language.”
Video is much better than text-messaging because it’s faster and it’s better at conveying emotion, said Jessica DeWitt, a UW undergraduate in psychology who is deaf and is a collaborator on the MobileASL project. She says a large part of her communication is with facial expressions, which are transmitted over the video phones.
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