RFID Technology to Aid in Education of Deaf and Hearing-Impaired Students

In our last post we gave you a pretty broad overview of RFID technology and mentioned that we’d be focusing on RFID for a little while, since it is one of the more exciting emerging networking technologies for which ingenious people are finding ingenious applications. Well, here’s one of them.

The process of education is fraught with philosophical difficulties. How do you teach a student that a picture of an apple corresponds with the letters a-p-p-l-e corresponds with the word-sound “apple?” If you really think about it, it’s a miracle we learn anything at all. And now imagine how difficult it is for hearing-impaired students. Two researchers at Southeastern Louisiana University
are working on this very problem--and they’re using RFID technology.

Becky Sue Parton and Robert Hancock, two assistant professors at SLU, have devised a project called the “Physical World Hyperlinking” teaching system. It is based off of the common Internet tendency to take a piece of text or an image and hyperlink it to something that expands on or clarifies its meaning. They’re applying that principle to everyday objects in order to teach deaf and hearing-impaired students their meanings and uses. Starting with an initial set of 500 objects--all equipped with RFID tags--the pair have created a system of reference whereby the objects trigger a computer to give information content such as an interpreter signing the word describing the object and photos or videos of the object in use.

For example, a student can pick up a pencil and then several photos of various pencils and variations of pencils will be displayed as well as a video of someone signing the word for pencil, the word pencil written in English, and a pronunciation guide for speaking the word pencil. The system can be used in the classroom or even adapted for home use via a laptop.

Parton and Hancock have been awarded a $390,000 grant from the US Department of Education to develop the Physical World Hyperlinking system. Traditionally, hearing-impaired students learn sign language by pairing classroom objects with drawings that depict the signs; this process is fairly slow, however, setting back such students five to six years behind the educational curve. Parton and Hancock contend that this new RFID-based system will teach students much more quickly by allowing them to interact with their environment on a more visceral and playful level.

Hopefully more education researchers will take advantage of RFID technology. This example really highlights some of the strengths of RFID. In a way, RFID allows the “real world” to catch up to the Information Age by imbuing everyday objects, from pencils to massive shipping containers, with a rich set of information.