Design and Development of Several Mobile Communication Systems for People with Hearing Disabilities

During the last decade we have attended to an impressive development of mobile communications which, unfortunately, deaf and hearing-impaired community cannot (in principle) take advantage of. In order to favour this people to take part in the Information Society, we have designed and developed some PC-based systems and applications which will provide several text-based services to them, such as real time and text mode communication between mobile text telephones and those connected to the PSTN or direct accessibility to Urgency Call Centers. We emphasize in this article the advantages of the software design methodology followed, which has led to the implementation of two systems which have shown to be robust and versatile in operation.