Communication Aid for Foreigner and Hearing Impairment at Station

Abstract

We developed a communication aid, called VUTE, which aids people who have difficulty in spoken communication such as elderly people with hearing impairments, deaf people and foreigners. We present an overview of VUTE 2010 that can be used at railway stations. This system displays picture symbols on a portable data terminal and prompts the user to select the appropriate symbol. Finally, it outputs sentences which correspond to the answers given by the user. We also carried out an evaluation test on seven subjects in their fifties or sixties. We confirmed that VUTE can output sentences that correspond to the situations which had been arranged in advance, without using written letters/characters or voices.