MEHIDA is a multimedia system offering hearing-impaired children an easy and attractive method to communicate with their hearing and deaf peers. It is a TOTAL COMMUNICATION method whose objective is the acquisition of various forms of communication available to the hearing impaired simultaneously: gesture, speech, dactylology, formal signing, lip reading, reading and writing. Didactic activities and games are used to teach the different means of communication. The approach gives the child the chance to practice the different types of communication. A character has been created in the shape of a pear to assist and guide the child. The pupil identifies with the character at all times, as it explains what the child is being asked to do during each activity. The MEHIDA learning process is divided into six stages: basic learning, prereading and prewriting, syllable, word, simple and complex sentence reading and writing. Each phase establishes a hierarchy of didactic objectives which are the expression of the skills and knowledge to be acquired by the child during the learning process (e.g., learning concepts of similarity) broken down into a series of lower level operational objectives (e.g., select figures of the same shape, size and color).

Date Published: 14 March 1995
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 2417, Multimedia Computing and Networking 1995, (14 March 1995); doi: 10.1117/12.206050

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2417:
Multimedia Computing and Networking 1995
Arturo A. Rodriguez; Jacek Maitan, Editor(s)