Learning Technologies for the Hearing Impaired

The current practice for stone deaf children is to teach them a sign language so that they can communicate with others with the fundamental limitation that they can only communicate with those who know the sign language. The respective parents starts with a rudimentary sign language at home from the age of nine months and then the child continues learning a sign language in a primary or kindergarten school. There are different sign languages used in different schools - there is a wide variety of sign languages across countries and cultures. Even after mastering a sign language (or a couple of sign languages) the deaf child can only communicate with those who know the sign language. By this time if he or she can read and write then he or she can also communicate with some one who does not know sign language. The sign language is taught to a child by the following three steps: 1. Associating a sign with the picture of an object or the object itself. 2. Associating a sign with a word or alphabetical character. 3. By this stage a deaf person can read or write a language and now is able to communicate with any one through reading and writing. In this research I intend to remove the first two steps - that essentially means removing the sign language - and jump to step 3 directly through the use of technology. It means that the parents will show their stone-deaf child an actual cat and a card or in an application with the word CAT". The Application is not just learning but also assertive too."