HCC-Small: Mobile ASL: Providing Mobile Video Communications to the Deaf Community Through User-Centered Design and Deployment

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Video-enabled cell phones have the potential to enable Deaf people to speak in their community's native language (which in the United States is American Sign Language or ASL), while gaining the freedom, flexibility, and comfort afforded by the wireless phone revolution. Real-time video-enabled cell phones are available in Japan and parts of Europe based on higher bandwidth cell phone technology, and Deaf people in those countries have already begun using these devices to communicate with each other. In the United States, however, it remains a major scientific and technical challenge to provide real-time video-enabled cell phones. The PIs' goal in their ongoing MobileASL effort has been to develop and evaluate low bandwidth, high fidelity, error-resilient, and low complexity software video encoders that are tailored for compressing ASL video; achieving such advances requires novel laboratory and field studies with Deaf individuals. The specific objectives of the current project are four fold: To implement improvements to the MobileASL codec including combined stabilization and compression algorithms for hand-held captured video, packet loss mitigation techniques, and further complexity reduction; To finalize the real-time implementation of the ASL codec on cell phones, To determine ideal default setting and desirable options for encoding through laboratory studies of the features of the PIs' ASL codec including region-of-interest coding, variable frame rate encoding, lower complexity encoding, and ASL-specific error concealment strategies; To conduct an extended field study with deployed cell phones in the Deaf community. Broader Impacts: Left out of the cell phone revolution are the approximately 500,000 Deaf people in the United States who use ASL. This community has embraced Internet-enabled video phone technology, but still cannot speak with each other on cell phones in their natural language. This project will rectify that situation, by bringing mobile ASL communication to the Deaf community. By incorporating the Deaf community's input into the design of all aspects of the system, the PIs will help ensure that the ASL video cell phones will penetrate the Deaf community. By employing Deaf undergraduates as summer research interns, these students will be inspired to continue their research careers and seek higher degrees. Real-time video-enabled cell phones will also be useful for the general population who wish to communicate face-to-face in a mobile environment.