Assistive Technology for Deaf People Based on Android Platform

Social communication is one of the most important pillars that our society based on. It is well-known that the language is the only way to communicate and interact with each other verbally or non-verbal way. People with special needs are members of this society and have the right to enjoy the communication with the external environment in an easy and professional manner. This paper aims to provide an interesting application that guarantees ultimate communication with the disabled users and vice versa. The key feature of this application is employing the Arabic language as a medium of communication to learn all the sign language terms. The power of this application appears in two aspects: first of all, the ability of normal people to communicate with the targeted people without having any previous knowledge on signs language. This can be either achieved by voice recognition of words or by typing the words in the Arabic language. The application is then displays the appropriate image(s) in the sign language. Secondly, and more importantly, people with special needs communicate with normal people by choosing the signs images on their phones from the numerous categories stored in the databases which express their ideas and thoughts. Consequently, the set of images is transformed into a text paragraph. We evaluated our application by testing it on real deaf and dumb users. We carefully created scenarios on realistic situations. The early results are promising as all deaf found the proposed technology useful and 90% of them wanted to use it on daily basis. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.