01 November 2006

Equipping People with Disabilities to Meet Daily Challenges

Many government and nongovernmental programs, centers of study, publications, and research reports address issues related to disabilities and technological advances that help mitigate them. Disability-related projects involve everything from face-to-face and long-distance communication to mobility, from learning aids to robotics for the workplace. The projects currently underway and new advances recently announced are too numerous to recount in one article, or even an entire journal. One project that illustrates the kind of practical innovation that is going on is being funded by an “Innovation Grant” from the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) of Syracuse University in New York. Led by a faculty member of the university’s School of Information Studies, the project also involves hospitals around the state.

Internet Video Interpreting for Remote American Sign Language (ASL) Services

Imagine. You cannot hear, and you cannot speak without sign language. You bring your injured child into the emergency room at the hospital. No one can explain to you what is happening, what you are supposed to do, and what you can expect. Your concern is escalating, and the doctors need information you cannot provide. What can you do?

In New York, recent amendments to the state’s Official Compilation of Codes, Rules, and Regulations require health care facilities to make language assistance services available to “patients in the inpatient and outpatient setting within 20 minutes and to patients in the emergency service within 10 minutes of a request” for such services, whether the language is Chinese or American Sign Language (ASL). Health care facilities in Syracuse and elsewhere in the state of New York are actively exploring ways to comply with this new stipulation. Video-delivered ASL services, where the interpreter makes a “house call” to the facility from a remote location over the Internet, is an innovative option under serious consideration. The Internet promises an entirely new capacity to broaden social inclusion, and ASL services of significant interest include interpreting, mental health counseling, and emergency preparedness and disaster response.

In Phase 1 of the BBI Innovation Grant research project, three research sites, all located in the city of Syracuse, are exploring ASL via the Internet. Two of the sites are hospitals that use ASL services, and the third is a nonprofit provider of such services. Research questions of interest include: What ASL services are provided and used today? What new opportunities and challenges stem from Internet delivery of ASL services? While there are exciting new business and service opportunities from Internet delivery, there are also challenges that must be overcome before Internet-delivered ASL services become commonplace. One likely source of challenge is compliance with HIPAA (privacy regulations regarding health information that put strong requirements on medical offices to protect patient medical information). In Phase 2 of the project, health care facilities in a 14-county area in New York will be surveyed on their readiness for complying with the new stipulations on access to ASL services and on prospects for adopting Internet-delivered ASL services.