Using talking lights illumination-based communication networks to enhance word comprehension by people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

This article details a new method that has been developed to transmit auditory and visual information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In this method, ordinary fluorescent lighting is modulated to carry an assistive data signal throughout a room while causing no flicker or other distracting visual problems. In limited trials with participants who are deaf or hard of hearing, this assistive system, combined with commercial voice recognition software, showed statistically significant improvement in sentence recognition compared to recognition of audio-only or audio-plus-speech-reading stimuli.