One of the major shortcomings of society is the social barrier that is created between disabled or handicapped persons and persons who are blessed with all their human faculties in order. Communication, which is the basis of human progress, often tends to be an obstacle for those unfortunate people who are unable to articulate their thoughts. This paper illustrates the lack of proper means to overcome this communication barrier, which has led to social inequality resulting in day to day problems for deaf and mute persons to converse with normal people. The root cause of this gap is that while deaf and mute persons use sign language to communicate among themselves, normal people are either reluctant to learn it or are unable to comprehend the same. Further, the former rely on lip reading to comprehend what their counterparts have said. Consequently, in a conversation between a hearing and speech impaired person and a normal person the ease of communication and hence the comfort level is hampered. In this survey, we present research, statistics and development trends on the aforementioned subject. We provide a comparison of existing applications and research efforts to bridge the communication gap between hearing and speech impaired persons and normal persons. This survey also reports statistics on hearing and speech impaired persons in India and emphasizes the need of an effective, efficient and portable solution that can overcome the communication problem for hearing and speech impaired persons.
Published In : IJCSN Journal Volume 2, Issue 6
Date of Publication : 01 December 2013
Pages : 32 - 36
Figures : --
Tables : 04
Publication Link : ijcsn.org/IJCSN-2013/2-6/IJCSN-2013-2-6-121.pdf
Nisha Advani : Department of Information Technology, Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, University of Pune
Pune-4111048, Maharashtra, India.
Sayali Bora : Department of Information Technology, Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, University of Pune
Pune-4111048, Maharashtra, India.
Apeksha Bhat : Department of Information Technology, Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, University of Pune
Pune-4111048, Maharashtra, India.
Shubhangi Yerolkar : Department of Information Technology, Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, University of Pune
Pune-4111048, Maharashtra, India.
According our study, we observed that if we want to bridge the communication gap between hearing and speech impaired people and normal people, we need to develop a technique that allows disabled persons to effectively and efficiently communicate with normal persons in Indian languages. Existing solutions lack support for Indian languages.
From the literature survey conducted, the demographical study, the study of existing applications and proposed solutions we come to the following conclusions:
a) Hearing and speech impaired persons rely on sign language to communicate among their peers but this is not convenient to communicate with normal persons as the latter do not understand sign language.
b) To comprehend the words spoken by a person, a deaf candidate relies on lip reading, which is an age-old but highly erratic and unreliable technique.
c) There is a huge communication gap between hearing and speech impaired persons and normal persons which creates social divide and leads to dearth of equal opportunity for disabled people.
d) The applications available on Google Play Store are not of any significant use to Indian disabled people as they are based in English, which only the literate are blessed to know and use American Standard Sign Language which is not followed in India.
e) There is no single application or solution that integrates all the facets of communication and enables a disabled person to have an almost normal conversation with a normal person.
f) The proposed methodologies are not adequate as they are not useful on-the-go. Most are desktop based solutions, which have restricted use.
[1] Census of India 2001 (www.censusindia.gov.in).
[2] Prashanth Suresh, Niraj Vasudevan, Nilesh Ananthanarayanan, “Computer-aided Interpreter for Hearing and Speech Impaired”, in 2012 Fourth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks, 978-0-7695-4821-0/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CICSyN.2012.53.
[3] Resmi K, Radhika Chhabra, Satish Kumar, H.K. Sardana, “Graphical Speech Training System for Hearing Impaired”, in 2011 International Conference on Image Information Processing, (ICIIP 2011).
[4] Ibrahim Patel, Dr. Y. Srinivas Rao, “Automated Speech Synthesizer and Converter In Cue Symbol Generation for Hearing Impards”, in International Journal of Recent Trends in Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 7, November 2009.
[5] C.Jeyalakshmi, Dr. V. Krishnamurthi, Dr.A.Revathy, “Deaf Speech Assessment Using Digital Processing Techniques”, in Signal & Image Processing: An International Journal (SIPIJ) Vol.1, No.1, September 2010.
[6] Source: SARVEKSHANA, 47th round, National Sample Survey Organization, Department Of Statistics, Ministry of Planning & Program Implementation, Government of India.
[7] CSO-MDS-2012, “MANUAL ON DISABILITY STATISTICS”, Government of India, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, www.mospi.gov.in, 2012.
[8] Country Profile on Disability, Japan International Cooperation Agency Planning and Evaluation Department, 2002.
[9] Downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/garethhannaway420.
[10] Sign Language Interpreter 1.0, Developed by Abhisoft Technologies, website: www.abhisoft.net.
[11] Note, Speak, Listen for deaf by sarslander, Developer website: http://deaf-hearing.blogspot.com.
[12] Sign Short Meassage Service by Wajee Mobile Ltd., Developer website: http://www.wajeemobile.com.
