Stimme: A Chat Application for Communicating with Hearing Impaired Persons

This paper presents an assistive technology framework which furnishes a communication interface in the form of a chat application for communicating between hearing impaired and ordinary persons using a mobile phone. It converts the voice messages of the ordinary person into texts. The framework then transforms the texts into a combination of specially designed chat acronyms. Finally, it relates the combination to a set of tactile feedback for the hearing impaired person. Morse code is used to provide the feedback. Empirical evidence suggests that our framework is both an acceptable and a viable approach for communicating with hearing impaired persons.