• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.53-63
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to look at the way that speech-to-text (STT) services are used at present, and to explore measures to institutionalize such services for ease of communication for the hearing impaired. The results of this study show the following: 1) 17.8% of those surveyed had experience of using STT services, with younger individuals showing a higher rate of use; and 2) In terms of organizations providing STT services, social welfare organizations followed by civic groups (18.3%) and public organizations (18.3%). The following institutional measures are needed for STT services. First, STT services should be actively promoted as one of the reasonable conveniences defined in the 'Act on the Prohibition of Discrimination Against Disabled Persons, Remedy Against Infringement of Their Rights, etc.' Second, STT services should be additionally listed as one of the clauses of the 'Act on Welfare of Persons with Disabilities'. In particular, establishing a communication system for those with hearing impairments should serve as a catalyst for integration with sign language interpretation and welfare services. If STT services for face-to-face contacts can be improved or further enhanced using ICT, it will not only open the way for a new influx of disabled workers to join vocational rehabilitation, but also help to improve quality of life for the hearing impaired.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Medicine & Therapy Science
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.39-45
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• 2018

Objective: The aimes of this study is to analyze the effects of presbycusis on the quality of life. Method: 47-elderly were participated. The participants were divided into the suspected hearing impaired group (N=18) and the within normal limits (WNL) group (N=29). One-way ANOVA was performed to determine the association between the HHIE and WHOQOL-BREF scores by age group, and independent t-test was carried out to analyze the inter-group relations. Results: The scores in WHOQOL-BREF differed significantly by age group (p=.011): people in their sixties scored $3.7{\pm}.62$, those in their seventies $3.3{\pm}.56$, and those in their eighties $2.8{\pm}.60$, with significant differences observed. There were statistically significant inter-group differences (p=.000), with significant differences observed. Conclusion: The quality of life of the elderly were lowered depending on age and hearing impairment.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.265-270
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• 2014

Hearing-impaired people have difficulty in hearing, so it is also hard for them to learn letters that represent sound and text that conveys complex and abstract concepts. Therefore it has been natural choice for the hearing-impaired people to use sign language for communication, which employes facial expression, and hands and body motion. However, the major communication methods in daily life are text and speech, which are big obstacles for the hearing-impaired people to access information, to learn and make intellectual activities, and to get jobs. As delivering information via internet become common the hearing-impaired people are experiencing more difficulty in accessing information since internet represents information mostly in text forms. This intensifies unbalance of information accessibility. This paper reports web-based text-to-sign language translating system that helps web designer to use sign language in web page design. Since the system is web-based, if web designers are equipped with common computing environment for internet browsing, they can use the system. The web-based text-to-sign language system takes the format of bulletin board as user interface. When web designers write paragraphs and post them through the bulletin board to the translating server, the server translates the incoming text to sign language, animates with 3D avatar and records the animation in a MP4 file. The file addresses are fetched by the bulletin board and it enables web designers embed the translated sign language file into their web pages by using HTML5 or Javascript. Also we analyzed text used by web pages of public services, then figured out new words to the translating system, and added to improve translation. This addition is expected to encourage wide and easy acceptance of web pages for hearing-impaired people to public services.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.121-128
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• 2015

In this paper, we introduce our smart phone application for hearing impaired people. Unlike previous hearing aids application, our application has both functions of self hearing tests and sound amplification. We provide user with two types of self hearing test, those are standard hearing test and detail hearing test. Each test has different advantages like short test time and accurate test result, however both tests provide reliable result. Our hearing test allows that user can measure their hearing loss level according to the frequency. Sound amplification function provide proper fitting formula by using NAL-NL1, and it guarantees high speech intelligibility. Our application can also memorize user's fitting data at specific test condition. Therefore those who using our hearing aids application can easily reset their hearing aids / earphone properties periodically. Our application is advanced at the aspect of self fitting function that no other previous application did. So we are expecting these comfortable processes about fitting lead the number of hearing aids user to be increased.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.87-92
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• 2023

As times develop, information becomes more diverse and methods of obtaining it become more diverse. About 80% of the amount of information gained in life is acquired through the visual sense. However, visually impaired people have limited ability to interpret visual materials. That's why Braille, a text for the blind, appeared. However, the Braille decoding rate of the blind is only 5%, and as the demand of the blind who want various forms of platforms or materials increases over time, development and product production for the blind are taking place. An example of product production is braille books, which seem to have more disadvantages than advantages, and unlike non-disabled people, it is true that access to information is still very difficult. In this paper, we designed a CNN-based Braille conversion and voice output device to make it easier for visually impaired people to obtain information than conventional methods. The device aims to improve the quality of life by allowing books, text images, or handwritten images that are not made in Braille to be converted into Braille through camera recognition, and designing a function that can be converted into voice according to the needs of the blind.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.141-147
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• 2018

Purpose : Aim of the this study was conducted to determine whether hearing aids are responsible for the quality of life by comparing quality of life between the elderly who are suspected of difficulty in hearing selected by Hearing Handicap Inventory of Elderly (HHIE) without using hearing aids and who are using hearing aids. Methods : For the study, two groups of 33 people were analyzed for independent t-test based on whether they wore Hearing Aids (HA) or not whom wearing hearing aids (hearing aids users) and suspected difficulty in hearing. who are attending the Religious organization Senior Welfare Center in the OO region. Result : The quality of life of hearing aid users is generally observed to be higher than that of non-users in general, and by the section, psychological (p=0.019) and living environment (p=0.032) were appeared statistically signigicant. The elderly showed a significant difference. In the section, "Operation Satisfaction (p=0.038)" in the physical health area, "relationship of reason (p=0.018)" in the social relationship area, "Economic margin (p=0.021)" in the environmental area, "Information accessibility (p=0.020)", In the psychological area, hearing aid was used for "self satisfaction (p=0.033)", "concentration of work (p=0.045)". Conclusion : The use of hearing aids by hearing loss elderly improves the quality of life in the psychological health and living environment section.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.385-394
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• 2010

Automatic gain control(AGC) is used in hearing aids to compensate for the hearing level as to reduced dynamic range. AGC is consisted of the main 4 factors which are compression threshold, compression ratio, attack time, and release time. This study especially focus on each individual need for optimum release time parameters that can be changed within 7 certain range such as 12, 64, 128, 512, 2094, and 4096ms. To estimate the effect of various release time in AGC, twelve normal hearing and twelve hearing impaired listeners are participated. The stimuli are used by one syllable and sentence which have the same acoustic energy respectively. Then, each of score of the word recognition score is checked in quiet and noise conditions. As a result, it is verified that most people have the different best recognition score on specific release time. Also, if hearing aids is set by the optimum release time in each person, it is helpful in speech recognition and discrimination.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2019.10a
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• pp.552-554
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• 2019

Deaf mutism (a hearing-impaired person and speech disorders) communicates using sign language. There are difficulties in communicating by voice. However, sign language can only be limited in communicating with people who know sign language because everyone doesn't use sign language when they communicate. In this paper, a finger language translation system is proposed and implemented as a means for the disabled and the non-disabled to communicate without difficulty. The proposed algorithm recognizes the finger language data by leap motion and self-learns the data using machine learning technology to increase recognition rate. We show performance improvement from the simulation results.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.73-84
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• 2019

This study is intended to suggest ways to improve the quality of the service of subtitles provided for the convenience of viewing for deaf people on e-sports broadcast content and game streamer content. Generally, subtitling files of broadcast content are manually written on air by stenographers, so a delay of 3 to 5 seconds is inevitable compared to the original content. Therefore, the present study proposed the formation of an automatic synchronization calibration system using speech recognition technology. In addition, a content application experiment using this system was conducted, and the final result confirmed that the time of synchronization error of subtitling data could be reduced to less than 1 second.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.8
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• pp.1111-1120
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• 2022

Image Capturing is a matter of viewing images and describing images in language. The problem is an important problem that can be solved by keeping, understanding, and bringing together two areas of image processing and natural language processing. In addition, by automatically recognizing and describing images in text, images can be converted into text and then into speech for visually impaired people to help them understand their surroundings, and important issues such as image search, art therapy, sports commentary, and real-time traffic information commentary. So far, the image captioning research approach focuses solely on recognizing and texturing images. However, various environments in reality must be considered for practical use, as well as being able to provide image descriptions for the intended purpose. In this work, we limit the universally available Korean and English image captioning models and text generation techniques for the purpose of image captioning.