HEALTH EDUCATION APPLICATIONS FOR DEAF PEOPLE-DESIGN MODELS, HIERARCHIES AND LEVELS

The aim of the paper is to answer to a research question: what are the challenges in designing e-health systems for deaf people and what are the needed design hierarchies and layers? The paper presents design models and research results regarding the layers and levels needed in the design of medical education systems for deaf people. The particularity of these applications is that the medical knowledge and concepts are translated towards the deaf user by an avatar interface that demonstrates the information converted in sign language. The current research objective is part of a larger objective, as the comparative study between medical education systems for deaf people based on video avatar technology and systems of medical education for deaf people based on animated avatar technology, starting from designing, continuing with implementation to results analysis. The paper reviews previous related work of the domain and proposes design models for this category of applications. The article contains a comparative study between design models for the deaf people medical education systems based on pseudo avatar video technology and the design models for the deaf people medical education systems based on avatar animated technology. A model for the architecture of the included medical database is suggested. The information will be structured also on several hierarchic levels. The first level main chapters are detailed in the second level subsections such as description, causes, prevention or description, methods, effects. The final section concludes the results of the comparative analysis and suggests the next steps for further research in the studied domain.