Short Explanation
Communication is one of the important keys to the interaction between medical personnel and their patients. Quoting from the results of our interview about 60% of diagnoses made by doctors come from direct verbal conversations with patients. You can imagine how much effort medical staff and patients need to expend if they have difficulty communicating, plus based on our research results, of all the disabled in Indonesia, 21.06% of them are deaf friends. Therefore, to learn about Deaf Friends’ direct experiences when accessing and communicating with health services, we have also conducted interviews with 6 Deaf Friends and 3 medical staff (doctors and nurses).
From the results of the interviews and research that we conducted, we obtained several things, Communication with Deaf Friends can be supported if the health facility has a sign language interpreter or the Deaf patient is accompanied by a companion/family who can speak verbally. However, it is not certain that both of these conditions can be met at any time.
By considering the conditions above, we found a gap that could be used to bridge communication between Deaf Friends and doctors in health service activities to achieve more accessible access to health. Through the KLIO Application, we help deaf friends and doctors communicate with each other quickly through chat consultations. In the chat room, deaf friends can see the doctor talk through BISINDO-based sign language animations. To make it easier for deaf friends, KLIO provides definitions for every vocabulary that contains medical terms.
Project Goals
KLIO aims to bridge communication between Deaf Friends and doctors in health service activities to achieve easier access to health. This app has several functionalities which are:
- Authentication using Apple ID
- Chat room between doctor and deaf friends
- BISINDO animation in chat for deaf friends
- The explanation for medical vocabulary for our deaf friends
- Text-to-speech input chat for doctor
Framework & Dependencies
- Texture iOS Framework
- UIKit Framework
- CryptoKit
- MessageKit
- Firebase Authentication (Apple ID, Conventional Email Password, Anonymous)
- Realtime Database Firebase Service
- Storage Firebase Service
- Github Action for CI/CD
Lesson Learned
In this project, I was entrusted as the lead engineer to develop KLIO. Here I learned many things starting from using the CBL method to formulate ideas and solving selected problems, namely bridging communication between deaf friends and doctors. In this project, I also learned how to do good agile development using JIRA.
In terms of design, I learned a lot from my friends Nabilla and Andrea to make UI / UX designs for iOS applications according to HIG rules and based on user-oriented designs. From a technical point of view, I learned a lot from my friends on this team, starting from just using the texture framework, firebase, playing animations on the iOS app, as well as the concept of encryption for chat and authentication features.
What challenges did we encounter? How did we respond?
For about 4 months, we had time to solve problems regarding the difficulty of deaf friends getting good communication with doctors and vice versa. In the beginning, we got a solution to make 1 application so that it could be used together for deaf friends and doctors, in the end after getting feedback from mentors and potential users, we decided to make 2 applications for each role. To determine a joint decision from feedback for existing problems we use the CBL method.
During the development period, we also experienced some unexpected things such as UI bugs in Texture UIKit because there were differences in appearance and behavior between the simulator and the original device on iOS, to solve these problems we did debug a 1 by 1 problem in our code.
Appreciation Section
Before closing this article, I would like to thank all members of the KLIO team namely Nabilla, Andrea, Ilham, Alco, and Daniel who have worked with me for 4 months to make KLIO. I hope we can continue this collaboration to build KLIO so that we can continue to help deaf friends and doctors to communicate with each other.