The Wisdom of the Customer

For a couple of months now, Lawrence, Jie, and I have been brainstorming with a professor from the UCSD Medical School about some potential assistive listening devices that Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people may benefit from. This is a really cool prospect because it's not only a compelling application for the computer audition research that I am interested in, but also an opportunity to help develop technology for a community that has seen few technological breakthroughs.

Before beginning any implementation, we wanted to first share and discuss our ideas with our customer, the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. The most important question: Will these devices even be useful? And similarly: In what scenarios would these devices be used in? How should the device look and how should it be worn? What other features would be useful?

We were lucky to work with a team from the medical school that was actively involved with the local Deaf Community Services (DCS) group. They helped us with everything from advertising to coordinating participant schedules while we prepared speeches and rehearsed with ASL interpreters. It took a substantially nontrivial amount of time, something that always takes me, the engineer/non-people-person, by surprise. But we finally had three focus groups take place right before winter break with two deaf groups and one hard-of-hearing group.

Meeting the participants and then facilitating discussion was really a tremendous experience. People were thoughtful and articulate and honest and, surprisingly supportive. Most of them were very excited about our ideas and encouraged us to "hurry and go make these things!" They not only gave us feedback for our devices, but also a glimpse of what their every-day life looks/feels like (In hindsight, this turned out to be infinitely more useful than had they simply answered our questions).

I learned so much from these discussions. People told stories of how they (along with family members and close friends) have learned to adapt their lives around their hearing loss, but not without continued daily frustrations -- people like doctors or restaurant workers or cashiers often ignore the fact that they are deaf or hard of hearing. Abnormal sounds such as a faucet left running for hours or a flight delay announcement at the airport are difficult, if not impossible, to detect, and often lead to extraordinary amounts of inconveniences and hassle. Most expressed English as their second language, ASL their first, how the two languages differ in structure, and consequently, how that impacts their proficiency for spoken and written English. They also advised us on potential legal matters, as well as where previous assistive listening devices had failed.

The more honest version of the story, however, would not overlook the fact that conducting each of these focus groups actually felt like running a marathon; they were ridiculously draining. I would stand there for two hours at a time before people who have and continue to overcome short and long term challenges that I will never know, and feel deeply humbled and intrigued by everything that was said. At the same time, I was overwhelmed by this continual outpour of emotion and information from the 8 or 9 participants who were all eager to sign their thoughts and opinions and stories. Some would veer off subject or misunderstand device functions. Others would sign out of turn, making it difficult for the single participant-side interpreter. Each exchange of dialogue also experienced some lag time as interpreters had to catch up with the spoken speech/signing, so I'd try to choose my words carefully as to minimize the number of sentences that needed to be signed.

There are some big ideas that I came away with in the end. First, the discussions gave me a much better understanding of the diversity in experiences/needs that come with different degrees of hearing loss, and consequently, the realization that no assistive device will be able to meet the needs of everyone. At the same time, a better understanding of this diversity is important as it may contribute to more cleverly designed devices that may be multi-functional and thus useful for more people -- perhaps even those not specifically deaf or hard of hearing.

As expected, some were wary of the role that new technologies would play. They voiced their concerns regarding the unpredictability of systems and the lack of support when needed, and how inappropriate it would be, for example, to even think for a second that these technologies could take the place of human interpreters at this point, especially in emergency situations. We just want more options, they say. The goal is to create more alternatives, not a revolution.

Finally, many people expressed their disappointment, not simply at the lack of technological advances in the area of assistive devices, but mainly, the lack of care and voice put into the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. A hearing person could buy a cellphone for $100. A deaf or hard-of-hearing person must spend over $1000 for extended features on the same phone, to accommodate their disability. Excited movie-goers pile into the theatre expecting closed captioning (as advertised), only to be told that there were technical difficulties that day and no closed captioning would be provided.

For most of us, the last two decades have brought pivotal advancements in science and technology, and as a result, we've seen these technologies play increasingly larger roles in our daily lives. But we sometimes fail to see that as universal as these technologies seem to be, they are still marketed toward a specific demographic. Minorities have different needs and are quickly forgotten.

At the time, I was also in the middle of reading Jeffrey Sach's "The End of Poverty" -- a very good book. A related idea that Sachs emphasizes throughout the book is how rich and poor countries are in need of vastly different technologies (not just in the digital sense, but also in medicine, agriculture, etc.) These technologies are not simply a subset of rich country technologies (as many people might think), but whole new creatures of its own. We, as a people, can be known for developing the most advanced cloning procedures or the most sophisticated computing technologies. But if there are still minorities (those who are poor, those with disabilities, heck, at one point, even those who are not male) who still feel like they are living in the stone age...then...is there something wrong? There are arguments for all kinds of answers to this question, but it will still never feel/be right.

In the end, I have no idea if we'll be able to achieve any of the fancy stuff we proposed at the focus groups, or even if they'll be any good. I feel torn as both the marketer and the engineer; I feel, in some ways, deeply accountable for my words now that I have personally interacted with all of these dear people, but at the same time knowing very well the limits of current machine learning/audio processing methods, as well as my own capabilities as a researcher. Perhaps I am taking this all too seriously, but who knows. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.