Deaf and hearing-impaired people join the world of smartphones

A team of engineers at the University of Washington have created a system that assists deaf and hearing-impaired people to communicate utilizing video chat. By using video chat, deaf people can use American Sign Language, just as they do in face-to-face conversations.

The engineers used eleven participants and conducted approximately 200 real time sign language phone calls. Each conversation only needed 30 kilobytes per second of bandwidth to transmit American sign language messages easily understood by both individuals.

The main issue the team is working on is finding a way to resolve optimizing the compressed video for sign language so that it can be transmitted on a 3G network, instead of requiring faster 4G network speeds.

Many high-end smartphones like the HTC Evo and Apple iPhone 4 already offer video conferencing, but broadband companies are now blocking the heavy-bandwidth conferencing from their networks and introducing tiered pricing plans to account for heavy data usage.

Texting and email are currently the preferable way for distance communication of deaf and hearing-impaired individuals. However the participants’ experiences with the MobileASL phone are good.

The MobileASL system could be integrated with the iPhone 4, the HTC Evo, or any device that has a video camera on the same side as the screen.