Smartwatches Can Help the Deaf

To be honest, with the introduction of smartwatches, I couldn’t help but to say “why?” That they would never be more than a toy or gimmick. Oh, yes, they can track fitness programs and such, but one can do that just fine without. But then I read the following article and thought ‘wow,this would be so good’. http://liliputing.com/2015/05/smartwatches-prove-useful-deaf-community.html

Now, it makes me wonder what other disabilities could be assisted with such technology?

I had an incident (nothing scary) for helping a deaf person with a computer, last year, in fact.

It brought to life the fact that we are still using dumb terminals - irrelevant of how successful fablets and i-things are in the world, today.
You see, you can’t unlike in Star Trek or even Quantum Leap, actually talk to your computer, which infuriates me.

Of course there’s 3rdparty apps that can and are simplistic at best, but really going back to my friend last year - he said his strategy for using a computer relied on two things:

  1. Obtaining a decent headphone for deaf people from this UK shop.
  2. Contacting this guy, through his blind-linux-organisation to consider the options.
    (It’s an official body I just can’t recall the organisation’s name right now- but it’ll come back to me in a year or so).
  3. Talk to other deaf people.

The third one is tricky because, there is a cliche in deaf communities that deaf people don’t want clubs.
Well things like skype and Google hangouts superseed that, in that, they allow people to present there own view, from their own house, and therefore their own perspective (as they see fit).

It’ll be interesting to know if we have any deaf readers, because I find their views quite enlightening sometimes; sod it frankly - fascinating.

So if you are deaf please post below. You can you know.