Paramedic Comes Up With A Simple But Brilliant Idea To Communicate With Hard Of Hearing People While Wearing A Face Mask

For those who are deaf or hard of hearing, communicating while the other person is wearing a face mask, can prove to be extremely difficult. People who rely on lip-reading while talking lose the opportunity to do so unless the mask allows seeing the lips of the person doing the talking. For this reason, a UK-based paramedic Danny Hughes shared a PSA on how to facilitate communication with patients and users of NHS services who lip-read.

The video almost instantly went viral after first being shared on Twitter last week. On Reddit, the paramedic's message gained over 117k likes with people praising Danny for the ingenious yet very simple and easy-to-implement idea. Scroll down below to hear what the paramedic had to say.

More info: Twitter | Reddit

In the United Kingdom alone, 1 in 6 people is affected by some level of hearing loss, which is estimated to be the second most common disability in the country. This includes deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing-impaired people. Scientists are estimating that by the year 2035, there’ll be around 14.2 million people with hearing loss across the UK, which means that 1 in 5 people will have hearing difficulties.

During the global pandemic, most of us are required to wear face masks especially health professionals. Because of this, millions of people who rely on lipreading to communicate found themselves struggling. While many people offered their solutions to the problem, some people on the internet think that Danny's simple and effective idea takes the cake when it comes to making fast decisions.

"I'd like to take a few seconds of your time to say that some of our patients and service users rely on lipreading to communicate and wearing a mask makes lipreading almost impossible," Danny begins the video.

"I found that using this app called Google Live Transcribe and other voice-to-text transcribe apps can be really, really beneficial in communicating with those patients," he says while simultaneously demonstrating how it works in real-time. "If you found this helpful, please share. Thank you and stay safe," Danny finishes off his message.

"What an incredible response," he shared on Twitter after the video message went viral. "I'm pleased to be able to share the concept and potential this technology has in helping individuals communicate. It isn't a perfect solution but everyone's communication needs are different so a one-size-fits-all approach won't help everyone," Danny wrote. "It has raised a few points surrounding data protection," the paramedic added after one woman on Twitter raised concerns for data protection. "As a service, we are currently looking into this and whether it can be safely rolled out to all of our staff. So as a disclaimer, you should make your own data protection/governance assessments for suitability."