Researchers from University of Washington (UW) have been developing and testing a tool to allow sign language to be used on a cell phone. The tool is called MobileASL, which will allow the hearing impaired to communicate using sign language over cell phones.
You should be wondering why there is a need for using sign language on cellphone for the hearing impaired? Can’t they simply communicate via text message or IM? The reason is – texting does not necessarily convey its real meaning and could be misinterpreted sometime. For the hearing impaired, sign language is their everyday communication language, so they’re definitely more used to using sign language to communicate more precisely.
The MobileASL tool uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmits the image or video over the US cellular networks. Although smart phones like the iPhone 4 and HTC EVO 4G support video conferencing but the users will have to incur more costs due to heavier bandwidth usage. The MobileASL app is claimed to consume only a tenth of the bandwidth required by iPhone 4′s FaceTime video conferencing. And it can be integrated into any mobile phone with video camera; thus you do not have to own a costly smart phone and data plan to use the MobileASL sign language communication tool.
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