Communication App for Children with Hearing and Developmental Difficulties

The purpose of this article is to examine a mobile application to support children and students with hearing difficulties or/and developmental disorders in interacting, understanding, and preparing for transitions between activities in their daily, school, and social lives. We think that a communication support technique using a combination of characters, pictograms, and photographs is effective for these types of persons with disabilities. This application recognizes words spoken using a speech recognition system and arranges the pictures corresponding to the speech-recognized words in a sequence. By showing a sequence of pictures corresponding to a conversation, our application enables children with hearing difficulties and developmental disorder to understand their situations. The results of two demonstration experiments show that the application promotes mutual understanding between students with hearing difficulties and those who have developmental disorders by utilizing pictograms and photographs in combination with speech. Although it is just basic line and still has problems as platform, the study suggests that it is clearly useful and that present issues could be improved. We suggest that the application could support visualization and feedback for planning as a new way of communication for children and students with hearing difficulties and developmental disorders.