The wireless industry often has found itself at odds with advocacy groups for the hearing-impaired community as industry has worked to incorporate technology into its phones to allow deaf and hard-of-hearing customers to make use of wireless products.
Now wireless is being used in a new way specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The Georgia Tech Research Institute has spent the past four years developing a technology that makes use of wireless local area network technology to deliver captions in public venues.
The idea for the technology was born five years ago during a lunch meeting among the project’s director, Leanne West, and her colleagues. The group was discussing the litigation some movie theaters were facing at the time over the lack of captioning offered to deaf and hard-of-hearing patrons. West and her colleagues began to envision a captioning system that could be used in movie theaters and other large public venues, including places of worship, schools and sports arenas.
West said one of the project’s primary steps was to evaluate the market for wearable captioning technology. The group worked with the Georgia Council for the Hearing Impaired to poll its members and staff about whether there was a need for such a product.
“We didn’t want to build something if nobody was going to use it,” said West.
The project received funding in 2001 via a grant from the Wireless Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center at Georgia Tech. The RERC is funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, which is a unit of the U.S. Department of Education.
GTRI, the nonprofit research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology, then went to work developing the system. The group built a prototype of the technology and solicited feedback from GCHI members. The researchers also worked with the advocacy group Self Help for Hard of Hearing People, or SHHH, to do additional testing and evaluation during one of the organization’s national conferences.
GTRI’s software takes captioning data and transfers it over a Wi-Fi network to an end user’s device. Venues must deploy a WLAN network as well as GTRI’s software, and they must provide the caption text. West noted the technology is timely because many large venues, schools and municipalities already have WLAN networks or are in the process of deploying them.
An end user must have a personal digital assistant or laptop with GTRI’s software downloaded on it or borrow one from venues that choose to loan out devices. In addition, customers might opt to buy and use microdisplays for use in situations where they would not want to glance at their PDAs to read captions, such as at movies or at sporting events. With a microdisplay, worn on a headband or glasses, the captions “float” in front of the user and appear to overlay the object they are looking at.
West said the system is made up of off-the-shelf products to keep costs down and promote growth of the technology.
Captions are usually prerecorded for movies, but other venues would have to provide caption text to fit the context or situation, like sporting events, school lectures and worship services. Text for captions can be created using a common shorthand typing method called Communication Access Real-Time Translation, or CART.
West said the software also is designed to support voice-recognition technology as it improves.
“Voice recognition is an obvious input for the software in the future, but it’s not an ideal solution right now,” said West. She noted in order for voice recognition to be a good partner for the software, accuracy and punctuation insertion needs to improve.
GTRI incorporated several features into the software, including customizable text size and color, background color and focus adjustment. Other optional advanced features include a chat feature and the ability to save caption text.
The technology recently was licensed to Marietta, Ga.-based Peacock Communications Inc. through Georgia Tech Research Corp.’s Office of Technology Licensing. Peacock, which is seeking funding to commercialize the product, plans to brand the software COMMplements and begin working with venues to implement the system.
