Students develop app for hearing impaired

Jaseem Abbas and Jose Baby, the 8th semester computer science students at Srinivas Institute of Technology (SIT) at Valachil here have developed an Android application which can enhance the communication of hearing impaired people through mobile phone.

The students said that their project has won the first place at the State-level Computer Society of India (CSI) Convention held in Bangalore this year and has got the sponsorship from Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology (KSCST), Bangalore.

Emergency messaging

The distinctive feature of the application, named as, 'Androear' is the facility to convert speech to text and text to speech within seconds making it easy for the hearing impaired to communicate. As the app allows quick switch between both the conversing mode, a normal person's speech will be received by the hearing impaired as text and his reply in the form of text message can be received at the other end as speech. Emergency messaging system is another peculiarity. If the hearing impaired person lands in a trouble situation, he or she can send an alert message to a pre-set number, say the number of police personnel or nearest relative, by just gently shaking the mobile phone hand set a couple of times.

The receiver can able to trace out the exact location of the disabled person after seeing the alert message.

Whistling alert

Another specialty is the facility to call or alert the user by just a whistling.

 "Consider, a situation where a hearing impaired person has been taken care of by a single person at home and the person suffers from illness and got bed-ridden. The bed-ridden person can alert the user somewhere at home by producing a mere whistle sound which will result a vibration in the cell phone which is with the user. This whistle detection facility will be available within a certain diameter only," Jose Baby told Deccan Herald. Jaseem Abbas added that for emergency messaging facility, the app depends on the range capacity of local mobile tower rather than satellites.

Apart from this, a hearing test programmes is there, which enables the user to find his actual hearing capacity.

A set of inspirational quotes for boosting the morale of the hearing impaired, links to blogs and sites dedicated to the community etc are also embedded in the app. Androear comes with preloaded videos which teaches the hand gesture communication method, specifically for hearing impaired and for others to understand the meanings of the gestures.

The application has been completed within a short span of 15 days under the guidance of Head of the department, Prof Shivkumar G S and with the support of the Principal of the college, Dr Shrinivasa Mayya D.