Communication between Medical Responders and Deaf Persons: a Mobile Application

SLEC (Sign Language Emergency Communicator) is a mobile system to support communication between deaf patients who communicate in sign language and emergency medical responders. Fast and effective communication is crucial during medical emergencies (e.g., to elicit information about symptoms), but emergency medical responders usually do not understand sign languages, and improvised speech and gesture-based communication can require much time and effort and lead to misunderstandings. Therefore, SLEC, designed with experts in emergency medicine as well as experts from the deaf community, allows emergency medical responders to quickly browse a collection of emergency-related sentences, and show videos of the corresponding translations in sign language to the deaf patients.