Lab for Hearing Impaired

HEARING IMPAIRED LANGUAGE LABORATORY

As per the feedback and discussion with Dr J.C.Patel the Hon. President of Rotary club Nadiad Samaj Seva & Sansodan Trust, Nadiad. Dist Kheda, it will better if Hearing impaired can have a device which can help them in developing their talking skill, so as per the need I have planed the Language Laboratory you can say it a phonetic Laboratory which will be a permanent installation in class room with a individual seating arrangement having individual equipment for learning by themselves under the monitoring of teacher. Each booth will have oscilloscope type of device that will show the wave pattern of student speech on screen along with pre-recorded or online teacher speech wave pattern. Students can keep on practicing until he improves to bring his speech wave pattern closest to the wave pattern of teacher. Student voice can be listened by teacher by selecting the particular student microphone and teacher can ask the student to watch and improved lip version on the screen of his equipment. Students will have the facility of calling teacher by pressing call button on his booth, student booth will have headphones with volume control for listening at their level.
In this Hearing Impaired Language Laboratory teacher panel will have facility to send the audio signal (Audio speech) to all student booth simultaneously with video camera facility for showing lip and body stress movement on the TV screen of classroom, this panel will control the switching of student booth equipment. Teacher can send the audio signal of own voice or any other Audio equipment like cassette tape recorder cum radio and audio CD through computer on the headphone of students or on classroom speaker and visuals on TV.

Student booth will have Audio spectrum viewing device on which he can view Audio spectrum of teacher and his/her own voice for comparing the stress point, student can record 12 second speech on his device fixed in his booth and can view and listen repeatedly for improving his/her own speech by on line feed back, the 12 second recorder will also serve the purpose of fast and perfect speech and word cramming
The above Hearing impaired language laboratory will be very much useful for improving talking skill, lesson grasping and cramming power through self asestive learning device.
I hope the new way of learning will be a pleasure way of studying for hearing impaired people.

 HEARING IMPAIRED PAGER COMMUNICATOR

Main theme of Hearing Impaired Pager is to make the communication easy between hearing impaired person and a normal person at individual level, it can also be used in a mass of Hearing impaired peoples in their intuition where they study and live. Communication is done through remote (cordless) coding unit which sends the coding signals predefined by a normal user who can be his parent, teacher or friend, these signals are received by the small portable unit in form of vibration.
The receiver unit can be kept in the pocket or it can be tied by Velcro belt on the body.
The pager (receiver) of hearing impaired person generate the signals in form of number of vibrations
The equipment of communicator are Pager (receiver) and transmitter which is portable and small cordless unit working on batteries, receiver unit generate vibration like that of Pager and Mobile phones, as per the instruction from transmitter

The HIPG (HEARING IMPAIRED PAGER) can be use in home and school, both the category of user will have to develop their code language
During my survey I came across few parents of hearing impaired peoples who felt that this system will help us lot in our routine life and then I thought that it may be used for masses in school of hearing impaired.
Presently the sample pager unit was taken by Mr Ranjit Bhattacharyya the Rehabilitation Officer & HOD, SERD from National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped Mumbai it has been found extremely useful with his hearing impaired peon and he has ordered for extra unit also.

For your information that this central government origination has given us the responsibility of training 10 hearing Impaired person for Installing, handling and distributing the electricity through Renewable electricity hybrid plant of Solar and Wind energy.

Deaf-mutes usually have normal speech apparatus. But they are unable to speak because, being unable to hear from childhood, they do not go through the slow process of imitation and correction through which normal people acquire speech.
Speech therapists work with deaf-mutes by teaching them breathing exercises, lip, jaw, and throat movements that result in sound production.
They also teach them lip-reading. As pupils are put through their paces, the therapists provide feedback, correction, and encouragement, signaling to them whether they are doing right or wrong.
All this is hard work, especially when a single teacher has to work with a group of students.
Jha, who is a technical assistant with the university’s physics department, hopes to help by using oscilloscopes to provide visual feedback to deaf-mutes learning to speak.
When a teacher produces a particular sound for pupils to imitate, in addition to mimicking the teacher’s lip and jaw movement, pupils have in front of them an oscilloscope displaying the wave-form of the sound produced. And when the pupil is on target, he gets to see that the wave-form of the sound he’s producing —which will be displayed on the lower part of the oscilloscope— matches that of the teacher’s.

There’s another problem Jha has worked to solve. Wave-forms of even the simplest sounds are highly complex and appear on oscilloscopes as scratchy, wavy lines.

This makes them extremely difficult for pupils - who essentially learn by trial and error— to reproduce.

But Jha has devised circuits that simplify complex wave-forms for each sound into simple visual cues appearing on the oscilloscope, making it much easier for the pupils.

‘‘The teacher will be able to even control how much simplification of the wave-form is required,’’ he said. ‘‘Fifty per cent, 60 per cent, the teacher can choose the level, depending on the level the pupil has reached.’’

Jha is planning for a pilot lab designed for ten pupils working with one teacher. In addition to an oscilloscope, each pupil will have in front of him a microphone. Also a button to call for the teacher’s attention. The lab will have a television screen on which the teacher’s face will appear in close-up. All this is estimated to cost some Rs 7 lakh.

Though Jha hasn’t yet worked with pupils, Dr Nandlal Manseta, head of the ENT Department at Shardaben Hospital, is very enthusiastic about the project.

‘‘This has every possibility of success. In fact, I don’t think this sort of a lab has been created before, although there are software packages using wave-forms to help deaf-mutes,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s my dream to have such a learning lab for deaf-mutes.’’

The Society of Freemasons has decided to help Jha with the finances, and in a few months the lab will be set up in Ahmedabad.

‘‘We haven’t decided yet which institute to set up the lab in, but by June we will do so,’’ said Rajiv Sethi, Past Master of the Freemasons. ‘‘We are optimistic that the lab will be ready by October.’’

Jha isn’t charging anything for his work. He not new to recognition, though. A Braille lab he designed for the blind won the national award for invention in 2002 from the Union Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment.

‘‘I want to invent things that people really need and take it to them,’’ he said.