Enabling profound hearing impaired children to articulate words using lip-reading through software application

Abstract

Objective: To mitigate the communication barriers of profound hearing-impaired children by enabling their word articulation ability.

Methods: This pre-experimental pilot study was conducted from September 2016 to March 2017 at the National Special Education Centre for Hearing Impaired Children, Islamabad, Pakistan, and comprised deaf children of both genders aged 5-8 years. A specially designed software application for lip-reading was employed to help the subjects articulate words. Each participant received 125 lip-reading sessions using the application. Evaluation was performed in five steps after every 25 individual sessions by a sign-language teacher, a speech therapist and family members of the individual concerned. SPSS 23 was used for data analysis.

Results: Of the 20 children, 10(50%) each were boys and girls. All participants reported an increased performance in articulating words with every passing session. The median score on the performance of children increased from first assessment to the last (p<0.05).

Conclusions: The articulation of words by the profound hearing-impaired children after experimentation was usually comprehensible for an inexperienced or a lay listener.

Keywords: Persons with hearing impairments, Word articulation, Deaf, Software technology..