— Assistant app to connect deaf people to 911

About

In the beginning of 2019, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness took the initiative to work on a pro bono project to create a tailored app to the deaf community in favor of facilitating 911 emergency calls.

A small team was put together with I lead the UX work and Product Design team and partnered with a Researcher, Developer and Product Manager.

Initial Learnings

Deaf users struggled and sometimes failed to communicate an emergency, leading to disconnected calls and confusion on the dispatcher side of things. Additionally, existing text-to-speech tools were rarely used by users, and when used, calls were approximately 3 times longer when compared to regular voice calls.

I created a framework that allowed that app to collect user’s information like full name, home address, age, gender, etc. and store in a database prior to the connection with an emergency dispatcher.

When a call is initiated, the app would ask the user questions that followed common scripts while the call is being connected. When the call is established and the dispatcher starts asking baseline questions about the emergency, answers are first pulled from the database by an AI component which translates from text-to-speech to the dispatcher.

As they ask further questions, these are then interpreted by the AI to formulate multiple choice answers and are presented in the interface as form-type answers with an option for keyboard input. But the main goal though, is to as best as possible provide ways for user input to quickly answer without the use of the keyboard which will allow users to get straight to the point and decrease call time.