A Pilot Study about the Smartwatch as Assistive Device for Deaf People

Abstract

In the last years the smartphone became an important tool for deaf and hard of hearing people. It's no wonder that many different smartphone based assistive tools were introduced recently, among them tools for environmental sound awareness. Even though smartphones seem to be a good way to implement such tools, with the smartwatch a new class of mobile computing devices became available. In this paper results from interviews with six deaf people about the use of a smartwatch as environmental sound alert are presented. The interviews showed that a smartwatch based environmental sound alert is promising as the participants were highly interested in using such a device.