Advancing Inclusive Beauty Experiences: A System for Communication Support for the Hearing Impaired in Hair Salon Environments

With the rapid advancement in both medicine and technology, the lives of individuals with hearing impairments have witnessed significant improvements. Nevertheless, in the course of our investigation, it has come to light that in certain settings, such as hair salons, individuals with hearing impairments are compelled to remove their hearing aids. Consequently, this poses a considerable challenge in effective communication with hairstylists. With the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, particularly in the realm of voice recognition, there has been notable progress in supporting individuals with hearing impairments. This paper introduces the design of a system aimed at providing an improved communication experience for individuals with hearing impairments in hair salon environments. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the system. The experiment included two tasks. We recruited 8 participants included 2 hairstylists and 6 hearing impaired. We conducted four questionnaires and a semi-structured interview. In the future, the system can be integrated with other existing IoT technologies for use in real hair salons and can be extended to broader users beyond the hearing impaired, including foreigners.