Maurizio LONGO | Patents

The invention discloses a telecommunication system for hearing impaired people including: a user interface equipped with an alpha-numeric identification code intended to a hearing impaired person and consisting of a keypad to dial the phone number (fixed or mobile) of a normal hearing person, a chat window (CW) to visualize the transmitted and received text and a section to enable an external gesture recognition (GR) device (if available). Besides, a centralized server is able to manage the whole phone session between the impaired and the normal hearing users. The session management includes the following steps: the hearing impaired person (caller) dials a telephone number of a normal hearing person (callee) and such a request is intercepted by the server that converts it in a signaling phone message and re-routes it towards the callee. Once the session is up, the caller can sent his/her messages on behalf either of the CW or of the GR system. These messages are intercepted by the server, converted in speech and sent to the callee. In the same way, the speech of the callee is intercepted by the server, converted in text and sent back to the caller. The caller and the callee can be of different nationalities too; in this case another step of cross-translation is managed by the server.