Deafness and the elderly

Deafness, as one of the most common disabilities in the world, is currently affecting 446 million people globally. As most healthy people’s daily functioning and communications are tied to auditory inputs, deaf people face a variety of challenges spanning all aspects of their lives. In the meanwhile, in the digital world, their situation is not getting any easier. For example, as healthy people’s socialization are being more fluid than ever with remote communication technologies, deaf people still face rigid and narrow socialization scope and are usually isolated from the main society. The challenges that deaf people face span from everyday issues such as can’t take a phone call or can’t hear public announcements to life-endangering situations, like not hearing a fire drill, which may cost them the best escaping opportunity.

The situation becomes even worse when someone’s deafness comes at birth.

It is estimated that up to 5 out of every 1000 newborns in the United States are deaf, and this number is expected to grow over 630 million in 2030, according to the WHO (world health organization).

Because the absence of sound imposes an extreme difficulty to the learning of spoken language, the vast majority of people who are born deaf cannot or are unwilling to speak. These people, referred to as deaf-muted, rely on sign language to communicate.

So the question is, are there assistive digital technologies that help improve the life quality of deaf people? Yes, there are. Live captions, telecommunication tools or visual (eg. infrared) signalers and some other technologies are all designed to help deaf people, but these are far from being adequate to address the need of everyone with deafness, especially of those who are also at old age.

Aging is usually directly related to a variety of decreased functionalities, such as compromised vision, motor abilities, cognitive abilities, etc. These age-induced factors result in many barriers in the digital context. For example, the elderlies have greater difficulty driving cars due to slower reactions and compromised motor abilities; they may have low cognitive and learning abilities which impede them from learning technologies; they also face cyberbullying as the society generally links older age to less competency of all kinds; the list goes on.

So what happens when old age is combined with deafness? The most direct impact in the digital context is that many assistive technologies don’t apply to them anymore: sadly, lots of assistive technologies are built on the premise that their users are normal in other functionalities and less often consider intersected disabilities or human differences. For example, telecommunication technology, which transfers text input into voice outputs, is used for deaf-muted people to communicate with people with normal hearing ability. However, a deaf elderly with fine motor disabilities (eg. shaky fingers) may not even be able to type text. The same applies to those who don’t know how to type. For example, in China, the text is typed with a pronunciation system called “Pinyin”, which was not even invented until 1958. Consequently, the vast majority of seniors in China don’t know how to type text. In other cases, people are proposing systems to transfer auditory information to visual images or physical sensory stimulus, but those are also common defective areas among the elderly.

Therefore, many assistive designs fail their purpose in front of combined disabilities or human differences. When designing assistive technology for one disability, it’s important to consider the potential existence of other human differences and their effects, especially ones like older age, which inevitably applies to everyone. In the case of telecommunication devices, one possible direction could be employing motion detection techniques: while it’s common for the elderly to have compromised fine motor abilities, their gross motor control, especially of their arms, remains mostly functional. Therefore, those deaf-muted elderly are most likely still able to use sign language. I suggest looking into the possibility of employing motion detection technology to translate sign language or lip movements (for those who know the pronunciations but are muted) into text or voice output; the benefit also applies to all deaf people by making their communication with normal people more efficient.

The thought mentioned above is only one specific example. The main idea is to not over-generalize any disabled group, as varieties and human differences exist among disabled groups as well. We should also make sure to incorporate them into every stage of the design process.

In short, the development of assistive technology is not keeping up with the pace of overall technological advancement. More attention should be paid to the inclusive design area so that we can create a more equal society for everybody.

References:

Cagle, Curt. (2020, February 08). A Digital Voice For The Mute. In BBN Times. https://www.bbntimes.com/technology/a-digital-voice-for-the-mute

Lancaster University. (2018, March 12). Why Are Some Old People Rejecting Digital Technologies?In Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312091715.htm

No Isolation. (2020, June 05). Why Do Many Seniors Have Trouble Using Technology?https://www.noisolation.com/global/research/why-do-many-seniors-have-trouble-using-technology/

Sobhan, Masrur & Chowdhury Z. Machrab & Ashman, Imamul. (2019 September). A Communication Aid System for Deaf and Mute using Vibrotactile and Visual Feedback. In Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336877461_A_Communication_Aid_System_for_Deaf_and_Mute_using_Vibrotactile_and_Visual_Feedback

World Health Organization. (2018, March 12). Deafness https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/deafness