We dream equal conditions for hearing impaired people...
Hearing impaired people do not have an opportunity to participate in socially standard universities or public lectures even though millions of interactive courses are available in the world. They may become underdeveloped because they cannot effectively participate in schools. Hence the jobs which are mostly unrelated to their fields are offered to them. In this context, appHear is a real-time voice-to-sign language converter designed and produced by Mimic Studios which gives the opportunity to hearing impaired people to participate in both social and educational environments by visually providing a simultaneous sign language animation via desktop application. The major function of appHear is converting speech to both subtitles and sign language in real time. The target language is Turkish, however, other languages according to their social extensity may be included in our future development.
The features we specified via appHear was mostly performed in the software side. Since the requirements for the software proportion was much complex, appHear was designed in blocks. The implementation was conducted through each block separately and an assembly operation was performed to the separate blocks in order to make appHear work.
For the hardware side of our product, only lavalier microphone is included. The available component is the microphone itself which has a permanent connection wire.
We as a team conducted lots of discussions, idea exchanges, interviews, tests for a whole year in order to obtain the best possible product description. Some features we find were not found reasonable from hearing impaired people. Also some design plans were not feasible which we realized late and thus we went into plan b at some point. Eventually we brought our product design to the final point. Hence, you will find our final design decisions, the trade-offs we made and our final thoughts about the product’s life.