As part of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's (MEXT) objectives of promoting greater cooperation between business, academic, and public sectors in urban areas, the Advanced Semiconductor Research Center of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has, in collaboration with the Tsukuba College of Technology, developed a system to provide remote support to facilitate classroom understanding in hearing-impaired students, which has now entered the trial stage. When attending classes, although hearing-impaired students can understand things written on the blackboard, they are unable to hear what the teacher is saying. To deal with this problem, support is currently provided by having volunteers sit with hearing-impaired students in the classroom to take notes and show them to the student. However, this method has serious problems both in terms of recruiting volunteers and the costs involved. Accordingly, AIST has developed a system of classroom support where the teacher's image and voice signals are sent via the internet to remote supporters who would make brief notes regarding the class and forward these to the students in the classroom (Figure 1). Requests for classroom support from students and status information concerning the availability of supporters to provide immediate support are managed by a server at AIST, which connects and manages the hearing-impaired students and supporters. In this system, the server mediates and coordinates the schedules of the both parties, which can reduce the burdens on supporters by making it possible to provide support from home rather than having to go to the classroom. Moreover, a feature of the system is the utilization of server functions. For example, once a support session is complete, feedback from the student and from the supporter concerning factors, such as the quality and compatibility of support, is gathered at the server, which can enable the coordinator to make the most suitable arrangements the next time a request for support is received. A non-profit organization (PCY298: Representative; Iwao Sekita [AIST]) was also established in March this year to provide training in PC note-taking technology for volunteers providing classroom support.

There are plans to promote and spread the use of this through Evolvable Systems Research Institute, Inc. a venture company licensed by AIST.

Figure 1: Outline of the System