Client-based Total Conversation Solution to Support People with Hearing Impairment in Medical Emergency.

To better assist people with hearing impairment in medical emergency, flexible multi-mode multi-party audio, video, and text conversations has become essential. We have developed a novel system for relayed communication service center to allow the middle specialist, who acts as the medium, to flexibly control the communication among the hearing-impaired person and other endpoints. This system extends our existing Client-based Multipoint Media Mixer to become a total conversation solution. It can serve multiple separate audio/video/text conversations, merge some or all of them to become a full or partial audio/video/text conference, detach some conversations from the ongoing conference, and mute mic/speaker of each or all participants. To offload the server, all of the functionalities including those similar to Multipoint Conference Unit (MCU) for multi-party video conference are implemented on the client-side which is the desktop client used by the middle specialist. Our system has been evaluated to be practical and is planned to be deployed to support emergency centers in Thailand.