Silent Rider: Visual-tactile messaging Interface for Customers and Deliverer with profound hearing loss

Preprint 2022

Jiani Wang and Youngjun Cho
Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK

We introduce Silent Rider, a visual-tactile messaging interface that aims to facilitate a hearing-impaired deliverer’s mobile phone communication with their customers.  Silent Rider augments a typical smartwatch interface with a virtual module that interchanges users’ different input modalities. A customer’s speech is converted into tactons for a user with profound hearing loss to understand, while the corresponding user can make voice output through customized messaging functions. To implement this interface, we first identify design requirement, then we present the system workflow and designed functionality. Lastly, we make a discussion on future design opportunities to help hearing impaired people communicate in the workplace.
*This work builds on our previous projects (see details in [1-5]).

References

[1] Cho, Y., Joung, M. and Kim, S., 2015. Device and method for generating vibrations. U.S. Patent Application 14/758,397.

[2] Schmitz, A., Holloway, C. and Cho, Y., 2020. Hearing through vibrations: Perception of musical emotions by profoundly deaf people. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.13265.

[3] Cho, Y., 2018. Sensorless Resonance Tracking of Resonant Electromagnetic Actuator through Back-EMF Estimation for Mobile Devices. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.07065.

[4] Cho, Y. and Joung, M., 2017. Display apparatus and method for operating the same. U.S. Patent 9,733,765.

[5] Cho, Y., Youn, J., Joung, M., and Kim, S., 2020. Vehicle display device and vehicle. U.S. Patent 10,534,440.