10 Gestural Interfaces for Hearing-Impaired Communication

Recent research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has focused on equipping machines with means of communication that are used between humans, such as speech and accompanying gestures. For the hearing impaired , the visual components of speech, such as lip movements, or ges-tural languages such as sign language are available means of communication. This has led researchers to focus on lip reading, sign language recognition, finger spelling, and synthesis. Gestural interfaces for translating sign languages, cued speech translators, finger spelling interfaces, gesture controlled applications, and tools for learning sign language have been developed in this area of HCI for the hearing impaired. Gestural interfaces developed for hearing impaired communication are naturally multimodal. Instead of using audio and visual signals, hearing impaired people use multiple vision based modalities such as hand movements , shapes, position, head movements, facial movements and expressions , and body movements in parallel to convey their message.