Transcript Slide 1

A Limited Communication Domain Mobile Aid for a Deaf patient at the Pharmacy
MB Motlhabi and WD Tucker
Computer Science Department, University of the Western Cape,
Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa.
INTRODUCTION
•This paper discusses a prototype for a health
communication aid on a mobile phone to
support a Deaf person visiting a public hospital
pharmacy to collect medicine.
•Deaf with a capital “D” is different from deaf
in that Deaf people primarily use sign
language to communicate[1].
•The mobile prototype will facilitate
communication in a limited domain scenario
that helps a Deaf person use South African
Sign Language (SASL) and text to communicate
with a non-signing pharmacist.
•We studied the dialogue and extracted the
most relevant content between the a Deaf
patient and a pharmacist during medicine
dispensing.
•We then translate instructions and
recommendations from the pharmacist in text
to SASL video for a Deaf patient to review
later.
•Our prototype is not an expect system and
does not use Artificial Intelligence techniques.
USER INTERFACE
•MobileASL
Pharmacist interaction
Deaf patient interaction
•The pharmacist reads patient information from
SignSupport to check for inconsistencies like
allergies and environmental conditions.
•Should there be any inconsistencies then
SignSupport will guide the pharmacist in letting the
patient know what has gone wrong and what is
being done to fix the problem.
•If all went well the pharmacist enters instructions
from a paper prescription from the doctor in the
phone to be later viewed in SASL by the patient.
•The patient can update their background
information and history by answering a guided
set of questions in SASL to be later viewed by the
pharmacist.
•After consultation with the pharmacist, the
patient can view medical instructions, warnings
and recommendations from the pharmacist in
sign language video.
•All needed sign language videos are prerecorded and stored on the phone.
MobileASL is a video compression project
that enables mobile wireless cell phone
communication through sign language.
Attention is given to frame-rates, Region
of Interest (ROI) and bit-rates so as to not
compromise sign language video
quality[4].
•TESSA
TESSA is an interactive system that
operates in a limited domain to aid
transactions between a Deaf person and
a clerk in a Post Office by translating the
clerks’ speech to sign language.
•ViSiCAST
ViSiCAST was designed to improve the
quality of Deaf people by widening their
access to services and facilities enjoyed
by the community at large[3].
REFERENCES
FUTURE WORK
•The next phase is to conduct user trials with
“real” Deaf users at a non-governmental
organization (NGO) called Deaf Community of
Cape Town (DCCT).
•We plan to use role playing as a means of
collecting data about the prototype and the
resulting interaction.
•The data collected will be used for the
second phase of developing SignSupport to
meet all users’ specifications.
•We will also tighten the limited domain
exchange to make it more efficient by finding
out from Deaf users and pharmacists how to
better structure the information that we
present on our SignSupport interface.
RELATED WORK
RESEARCH PROBLEM
How can we design, develop and evaluate a limited domain exchange mobile tool that will facilitate
seamless communication between a Deaf patient and a pharmacist at a public hospital pharmacy
during medicine dispensing.
SPONSORS
[1] D. Aarons and M. Glaser. A deaf adult literacy
collective. Stellenbosch papers in linguistics. (34):1-18,
2002.
[2] P. Chininthorn, A. Freudenthal, M. Glaser and W.D.
Tucker. Mobile communication tools for a South
African deaf patient in a pharmacy context. In Proc.
Information Society Technologies - Africa, (IST-Africa
2012), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, pages 1-8, 2012.
[3] R. Elliott, J.R.W. Glauert, J.R. Kennaway, and I.
Marshall. The Development of Language Processing
Support for the ViSiCAST Project University of East
Anglia. pages 1-6, 1997.
[4] A. Cavender, R.E. Ladner, and E.A. Riskin.
MobileASL: Intelligibility of sign language video as
constrained by mobile phone technology. In Proc. of
the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on
Computers and Accessibility, page 78, 2006.
[5] M. Mutemwa and W.D. Tucker. A Mobile Deaf-tohearing Communication Aid for Medical Diagnosis. In
Proc. South African Telecommunication Networks and
Applications Conference (SATNAC 2010), pages 1-6,
2010.