High-Tech Phones Offer Help for the Handicapped : Computerized equipment has greatly expanded the possibilities for people with impairments.
An idea came to Alan Simpkins as he watched his wife, Phyllis, undergo a test for her hearing loss. Increasingly unable to hear high-frequency sounds, she was finding it harder and harder to carry on a telephone conversation. So why, Simpkins wondered, couldn’t someone develop a telephone that zeros in on and boosts the volume of just the frequencies a person had difficulty hearing, just as stereo equipment raises bass and treble tones?
At that point, Simpkins recalled, all he had seen in special telephone equipment “was an amplifier, which amplifies what you can already hear. But what you need to hear is what is missing .”
Simpkins took his idea to an engineer at an electronics firm who agreed that a device similar to a graphic equalizer, which is used to enhance stereo sound, might be placed in a telephone handset.
The first time Phyllis Simpkins tried the resulting prototype, “her face just lighted up,” her husband said.
“It just made all the difference in the world,” she added, in an interview over the newly introduced Clarity telephone made by Walker Equipment, a subsidiary of Santa Cruz-based Plantronics.
Talking Computers
The Clarity phone is just one more example of what experts call “an explosion” in adaptive technology--high-tech devices designed to help overcome sight, speech, hearing and motion impairments.
“We hear every day of new adaptive things that are pushing back the frontiers for the vision-impaired and for all handicapped people,” said Rose Resnick, executive director of a San Francisco center for the blind and handicapped. “They are opening up tremendous new occupational fields.”
Resnick, who is blind, knows that first-hand. She used a “talking computer” that “reads” to her whatever text appears on the screen of her monitor to write about her experiences in a book titled “Dare to Dream.”
Technology for the handicapped got a major boost nearly 30 years ago with the launching of the nation’s space program, which accelerated the miniaturization of electronics and related technologies. In the 1980s, experts say, two other developments have spurred the field: The merging of computers and telephones opened new possibilities for adaptive devices, while a labor shortage has encouraged employers to hire handicapped people who, with adaptive devices, can perform many technical jobs they once couldn’t.
“It’s just amazing what’s going on,” said Chuck Fleming, chief of community access and rehabilitation engineering for the California Department of Rehabilitation.
Moreover, there are more handicapped people as medical advances extend the lives of, among others, those who survive major accidents and congenital health problems. The number of people over age 64 suffering from hearing losses similar to Phyllis Simpkins’, a condition known as presbycusis, is estimated at 8 million.
Mail-Order Service
For David Zuchowski, an Ohio Bell employee born blind, adaptive technology meant a promotion from telephone operator to service representative. Engineers at the Cleveland-based company devised a special headset that enables Zuchowski to listen to a customer with one ear and to hear, through his other ear, a synthesized voice reading reference materials on his computer screen.
“If someone had told me when I started training that I would have been this comfortable and relaxed using this new system, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Zuchowski said.
Many adaptive telecommunications devices are available through a mail-order service operated by American Telephone & Telegraph, the AT&T; National Special Needs Center, in Parsipanny, N.J., including:
A $350 telephone for people with severe motion such as quadriplegia. It has a built-in speaker-phone that requires only that a user be able to activate the on-off button and one of 18 other buttons that dial preprogrammed numbers--for an operator, say, or a neighbor, even a hair dresser. (An earlier and more costly version would only dial 0.)
- A wand-like “artificial larynx” held against the throat generates vibrations for the speech-impaired similar to those made by healthy vocal cords. By forming words with one’s mouth, the vibrations are shaped into sound waves “heard” by the telephone.
- Signaling devices for people who have difficulty hearing a phone’s ringing. One device concentrates the sound energy of the ringing into a frequency range more easily heard by people with hearing impairments. Another can cause a lamp to flash on and off when the phone rings.
“We’re looking at a lot of things,” said Ron Hatley, a spokesman for AT&T;’s special-needs center. “One thing I’d like to see is a voice-recognition device, so a person could just say, ‘Dial Ron,’ and my number would be dialed. But that’s a ways down the road yet.”
Hatley said the Clarity phone’s ability to select just the higher sound frequencies for amplification makes it unique. If it lives up to its manufacturer’s claims, Hatley said, it might also be offered through AT&T;’s special-needs center.
Push-button telephones were themselves a great improvement for the sight-impaired over dial phones, he said. Now push-button convenience can be coupled with a growing number of recorded information services, including “talking” yellow pages, that enable callers to select from a menu of topics and even a choice of languages. A new “Big Button Plus” model carried by the center offers inch-square buttons and heightened color contrast with stark white numbers against a bold black background.
The hearing-impaired have for years had machines called TDDs--telecommunications devices for the deaf. But these now are being made more versatile.
The original TDD, a form of teletypewriter, could only “speak” to persons using a similar device, drastically limiting its usefulness. But now, through new “relay-operator centers,” typed messages from a deaf person are read by a relay operator to the other party; the operator then types the spoken responses back to the original caller.
Only a few states, including California, have set up centers so far, but a dozen others are in development, on top of the hundreds of voluntary relay centers have existed for a number of years. Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission this summer ordered that the service eventually be made national.
As with many of the adaptive devices, developing the Walker Clarity telephone required development of no new technology, but merely adaptation of existing technology to an unserved market, said Alan Simpkins, the retired electronics executive who brought the idea to Plantronics and now sits on the company’s board. “Haven’t you noticed that when new things come on the market you tend to say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
“Well, people didn’t understand the problems hearing-loss people have,” he said. “Just making sound louder isn’t the answer.”
Marv Tseu, president of Plantronics’ Walker Equipment unit, said his company tries to “grow our products from real-life needs, then see if there is a larger market for them.”
He said the Clarity phone also offers a lower-pitched ring backed up by a visual confirmation in the form of a flashing light. A mute switch can shut off the transmitter end of the handset, reducing extraneous sounds. And the “clarity switch” itself is adjustable, Tseu said, for both volume and pitch--”like having a radio where you’re turning up the volume and treble at the same time.”
While Tseu said he doesn’t expect the Clarity to serve a mass market--its $280 retail price probably precludes that--there may be more people in need of such an enhancement than are currently willing to admit it.
“All the technology in the world won’t help unless they acknowledge and step up to it,” he explained. “There’s a lot of technology out there, but you need the active participation of the consumer or the technology is just going to sort of sit on the shelf.”
