SS05: HEARING AND COMMUNICATION

A WIRELESS PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT SYSTEM FOR USE WITH HEARING DEVICES

M. Vlaming (1), J. Sainz (2) and B. Grover (3)

(1) VU University Hospital, Amsterdam, Netherlands; (2) Moviquity, Madrid, Spain, Sweden; (3) The Royal National Institute For Deaf People, London, United Kingdom.

Personal Communication Systems such as PDA’s and mobile Smartphones are rapidly developing and they provide many new mobile personal applications in the area of communication, information, navigation, and entertainment. As such, these systems have a great potential for assisting persons that have some form of disability. SubProject 4 in the EU-FP6 HearCom Project has explored the potential of these devices to assist communication in particular for persons having a hearing problem, either from hearing impairment or just when in adverse acoustical conditions. One of the new potential services is the concept of a wireless public announcement system. In many public places such as airports, train stations, event-halls, and churches, auditive announcements are made that are relevant for a restricted geographical area. Understanding these messages is not always easy, in particular when having a hearing disability or when being disturbed by background sounds or attention distractions. In supplement to existing public announcement (PA) systems, a wireless PA system will be feasible that delivers the announcements both in auditive and textual format. These announcements can be given directly to the ear by headphone, or by hearing aid without acoustical interference, and given visually at the handheld display. These modes can also be combined when preferred. Moreover, these messages can be repeated and searched at any moment which will increase efficiency in time and effect. In addition actual local information such as time-tables can be offered as well. Such a wireless system can be deployed relatively easily based on standard local communication technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth and others. Also the client application will be relatively small and downloadable to PDA or Smartphone. In this talk an outline will be given of a first wireless PA demonstrator system for evaluation using hearing-impaired persons.

[This work was supported by grants from the European Union FP6 Project 004171 HearCom.]