It is difficult for the deafblind or the hearing impaired persons to control their voice pitch because they cannot perceive their voice pitch. Especially in case of singing a song it is very difficult for them to control their one because they must keep a musical tone in stably. A voice pitch control system was developed to assist their singing by using a tactile display. The tactile display is equipped with sixty-four piezoelectric vibrators in four rows (16 x 4 rows). A user put his/her the last joint of index finger on the tactile display to receive tactile stimuli. The user can control his/her voice pitch using tactile feedback. In this study the voice pitch of two subjects were measured to calculate interval deviation which was difference from the voice pitch to a target musical interval. The average data of the interval deviation including both subjects was 117.5[cent]. This result shows that the deafblind subjects in this study be able to sing a song as much accuracy as hearing adults or hearing children.

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Deaf or hard-of-hearing people need support services such as real-time captioning. It is fairly common for captionists to be unable to perform captioning services. In order to address this problem, we proposed a Mobile-type Remote-captioning System. The main characteristic of our system is to use two functions of one mobile phone (e.g. the iPhone 3G/3GS, Apple Computer, Inc.) at the same time. The two functions are to display the captions input by the captionists (data communications) and to call the captionists to transmit the speaker's speech to the captionists (telephone call). The purpose of our research was to make clear the differences with the existing system, and to discover the advantages and faults of our system. In this study, we investigated these issues using a questionnaire for captionists who had used our system. As a result, we found that our system is suitable for a situation in which the speaker and the deaf or hard-of-hearing person are communicating while walking together (e.g. excursions, plant tours), whether indoors or outdoors. In addition, it reduces the stress that can be caused to deaf or hard-of-hearing children by having adults (captionists) other than teachers in the classroom.

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Several Japanese cosmetic companies provide information of makeup to visually impaired persons by their web site, Braille leaflets, or seminars. However, from our result of questionnaires carried out on 25 visually impaired women, we found that the provision of information is not sufficient. They feel uncertainty to their makeup and there is a need to a system that support teaching and checking the makeup. We have been developing a prototype of a makeup support system and until now, a fundamental image processing method, information providing and teaching function for how to apply makeup, and a user interface for visually impaired persons have been built into the system. The usability assessment for the provided information and teaching function were carried out by 8 visually impaired women in the age group of 20 to 70 years. The result showed that the developed system achieved a high score on factors related to the content of information. However, only two testers could achieve relatively high scores on the performance test and operability needs to be improved further for other users in order to ensure that they can use the system quickly and easily.

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For the deaf-blind person, in order to develop communication support device which could handwrite a letter on a palm, we have been studying apparent movement phenomenon by cold stimulus on a palm. From our previous experimental results, it was hypothesized that the reason why the apparent movement was not induced at certain region of palm was difference in perceptive characteristics for cold sensation. Therefore, we proposed new stimulation presentation method to induce apparent movement based on perceptive characteristics for cold sensation.
In the first experiment, perceptive characteristics for cold sensation on the palm were investigated. Response time to perceive coldness was used as one perceptive characteristics and that time was measured on 72 regions of palm by using peltier element and thermocouple. As a result, it was found that response time varied with palm region and subject. In the second experiment, an occurrence ratio of apparent movement by using stimulation presenting method based on the response time was compared with that by previous method in which response time was not considered. The difference between stimulation presenting method based on the response time and method without consideration for the response time was that response time was added to stimulus duration in the former method. From the results, it was found the occurrence ratio of apparent movement increased when two cold stimuli were presented by using stimulation presenting method based on the response time at two regions where both of response times were above average.

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