The voiceless telephone

Abstract

Communication in all its various forms, has always played an important role in both the business and social environments. The conventional telephone, taken more often than not for granted, is responsible for keeping over five million people in South Africa alone, in daily contact. For the deaf and mute society, of which their are approximately 300 000 in South Africa, the telephone, on its own, has remained a useless gadget. Without the aid of a personal computer or terminal and a modem, communication for the deaf via the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) has been impossible. Use of computers may be one way of overcoming this obvious problem, but expense now becomes the more important issue. To analyse the situation, two issues had to be taken into consideration. The first is, what makes the above solution so expensive, and the secondly, is thi!t expensive equipment necessary to complete the relatively simple task of interactive communication. The technology built into todays personal computers is continuously changing and in order to keep up with these changes, regular upgrades to the computer are necessary if one intends being able to recover ones investment at a later stage. The cost of a modem, with its sophisticated error-eorrection routines and auto-dial software, can also increase the initial outlay considerably. Bearing these costs in mind, it must now be investigated how one can achieve the objective of communicating with only the bear essential. By replacing the PC's monitor with a Liquid Crystal Display, the powerful processor with a relatively simple one, eliminating the disk storage entirely, reducing the on-board ROM!RAM memory, and finally, substituting a single-chip low speed modem for the free standing modem, the cost can be drastically reduced. By combining all these components together and developing a program to control them, the result is the 'Voiceless Telephone".