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Sign language calls meet standard
Ericsson has played a significant role in making a Netwise phone application for the deaf and hearing impaired compatible with the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) standards.
August 1, 2007
The SA Forum is a consortium of communications and computing companies that is jointly developing an SAF, open-source, high-availability platform standard. As a member of the SA Forum, Ericsson began the process in January this year to show that it was possible to adapt a commercially available application to SAF.
The adapted application, Netwise's MMX (Multimedia Exchange), allows deaf and hearing-impaired people to make calls using sign language.
"This kind of interpreter service must be a high-availability service," says Marcelo Tapia, System Designer at Netwise. "It is an important social service and it is not acceptable if the service is down when, for example, a deaf person needs to make a distress call."
Carl Engblom, Director of Technology at Ericsson, is in the project's reference group. "Of course, in the future, applications will be developed for SAF from the start. But in this small project we have shown that it is possible to adapt parts of an existing commercial application to this platform."
MMX allows sign language to be sent through a video channel over the public-switched telephone network, the internet or a 3G phone. An interpreter at a call center then relays the message to the hearing person by voice.
Those with 3G phones can also set up the interpreter service on the spot, allowing direct interpreting in a face-to-face encounter - the deaf person signs into the phone's video camera and the hearing person receives the interpreter's voice through the phone's speaker.
The adapted application was demonstrated recently at NXTcomm in Chicago. Today, MMX is being used in Germany, Spain and across Scandinavia. The US is the next targeted market for the application.
