A Sign Language Learning Application for Children with Hearing Difficulties

Kuniomi Shibata, Akira Hattori, Sayaka Matsumoto

The purpose of this paper is to develop a mobile application to support both sign language and literacy skills among children with hearing difficulties as part of rehabilitation engineering and to implement its basic functionality. This study will make it possible to support children with hearing difficulties in learning written language in combination with sign language, thereby emphasizing the importance of the latter, and in learning and communicating with their parents who use spoken language. This application has the following functions: (1) to register sign language clips acquired from a mobile device’s camera by attaching tags to them, (2) to save multiple sign language clips using sets and tags, and (3) to reproduce and play back sequences of the saved sign language clips. Because of a preliminary evaluation experiment, the application was highly evaluated by the collaborators, and most of the negative comments were attributed to the small amount of registered data and its inability to support use in complex situations. Based on this, we consider that the basic concept of this application has been successfully realized.

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