Case Study: Jan 2022

During the month of January we carried out a pair of case studies with two prominent schools for the Deaf in Saudi Arabia. They were interested in evaluating the gloves with their students with a view to their wider adoption. This post is a brief summary of the process that they went through to test out BrightSign, and the conclusions that they came to.

Selecting Students

Students from a range of age groups and with different signing experience were selected by their teachers to participate in the case study. They intentionally chose children with a whole range of backgrounds - some more willing to adopt assistive tech than others - in order to properly test the benefits and efficacy of BrightSign.

The Evaluation Process

Students each received their own gloves to use with their personal smartphones. In an initial set-up session lasting just an hour, all of the students were able to unbox and pair their gloves, as well as train a core library of signs with very little assistance. The students used our Getting Started guide and tutorial videos to learn how to use their gloves.

After this session, they then spent several weeks using their gloves in the classroom, at home and while out at the weekend with their family and friends. At the end of this testing period, all of the students, as well as the teachers guiding the study completed standardised evaluation forms which were returned to the school. Based on these results, a report was written to cover the students' and teachers' experience.

Results

All of the students said that they had found their gloves easy to set up and use, though one requested that we make our guides available in other languages so that those less comfortable with English would still be able to easily adopt the technology (something that we have now done).

Teachers and parents found that student's academic performance had increased to some degree. Their conclusion was that this was due to the fact that the students became more engaged in the classroom and were more able to communicate with non-signing family members to ask for assistance when doing homework.

The students all reported feeling more confident and many provided examples of how the gloves were able to make them more independent, such as allowing them to go and get a haircut on their own, without having to have a family member accompany them to provide instructions to the hairdresser.

Overall, the schools found that providing BrightSign gloves to their students increased their independence and integration with non-signers, allowing them to socialise in environments from which they would have previously been excluded. Academic performance was improved by their ability to engage with staff and hearing family and friends.

If you are interested in deploying BrightSign for your students and staff, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us and we will be happy to put you in contact with one of the schools in this case study for them to provide a reference and tell you about their experience.

Get Involved

Do you use BrightSign or are you interesting in testing it out in your institution or company? Would you be willing to provide feedback to us to help us improve our product and serve as a case study for future potential customers? If the answer to either of these questions is 'yes', please get in touch with us now to discuss how you could deploy BrightSign.