Let’s Talk: An Assistive Mobile Technology for Hearing and Speech Impaired Persons

With the advancement of technology, the quality of life of people has been profoundly enhanced. However, despite all the advantages that cutting-edge technologies are bringing, the hearing and speech-impaired persons cannot fully benefit from them. These individuals cannot easily comprehend the speech of normal people and as a result cannot respond to them. The primary aim of this paper is to bring the advancements in mobile application development to the hearing and speech impaired persons through the design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile application named Let's Talk. This mobile assistive technology aims at acting as an intermediary between the normal persons and the impaired ones so that they can communicate effectively. The Speech to Text functionality easily captures the voice of persons and translate them into written text that can be read and understood by the hearing impaired. Its Text to Speech feature converts a written text to voice output and finally the Sign Language functionality converts hand gestures into letters, words and sentences. Let's Talk has been tested in a non-Governmental organization in Mauritius and the results are very promising. We are confident that the Let's Talk mobile application will definitely assist the targeted audience to smoothen their daily activities and better integrate in the society.