Effectiveness of A Bluetooth Based Mobile Application for Hard-of-Hearing Persons in Communication with Hearing Ones
Ki-Hyung Hong, Korean Society of Augmentative and Alternative Communication · 2016
Background and Objectives: For deaf and hard-of-hearing people, the effective communication with hearing people is important for their independent living. As smart mobile devices have become very popular, lots of mobile applications are available for hard-of-hearing people to communicate with hearing people. Currently available such applications are ineffective. Some applications require extra cost for data communication, while others lack text typing aids for convenient and fast input by hard-of-hearing people. The purpose of this study was to develop a bluetooth-based mobile application for hard-of-hearing persons to communicate with hearing ones, and to verify the effectiveness of the application. Method: We identified the requirements of mobile applications for effective communication between hard-of-hearing and hearing people, and then developed a bluetooth-based mobile application. Bluetooth needs no extra cost in data communication. The application supports text typing aids for hard-of-hearing people, such as auto-completion of words, text reuse and built-in dialogs, and supports speech recognition for hearing people. Using speech recognition and synthesis makes hearing people more comfortable than using key pad in communication. In order to verify the effectiveness of our application, we conducted a usability test of the application with 20 hard-of-hearing persons. In the usability test, we measured the overall satisfaction, learnability and effectiveness of the application by using 5-point Likert scale. Results: The mean scores of overall satisfaction, learnability and effectiveness were 4.25, 4.31 and 4.45, respectively. Conclusion: The usability test showed that the application was very effective for hard-of-hearing persons. Some subjects pointed out a visibility problem of the user interface. The developed application focused on face-to-face conversation. Further studies are required to develop one-to-many communication applications that enable hard-of-hearing people to talk with many other persons in meetings and conferences.