SignSupport — Community-Based Co-Design of a Sign-Language Medication App with Cape Town's Deaf Community

South African Sign Language (SASL) has no standard written form, so Deaf patients who read written medication labels or verbal pharmacist instructions poorly are at elevated risk of dosing errors — a health-communication gap that conventional multilingual leaflets do not solve.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology's Design Engineering faculty and the University of the Western Cape's BANG computer-science initiative, together with the University of the Witwatersrand's SASL department, ran a community-based co-design (CBCD) process with the Deaf Community of Cape Town and the Vukani Deaf Club in Khayelitsha, alongside the Western Cape Department of Health and the Michael Mapongwana Community Health Centre. Between January and May 2014 they conducted semi-structured interviews using sensitizing tools with Deaf community members and health professionals to shape SignSupport, an app that prompts a pharmacist to select prescribed-medication instructions, which are then shown to the patient as pre-recorded SASL videos covering dosage and warnings.

The exploratory study involved 23 Deaf participants and 10 health professionals. Deaf participants reported understanding and satisfaction with the video-based instructions, and the research identified three effective information-delivery techniques for this population: sign-language video, 'health drama' combining multiple formats, and pictures paired with simple text.

The published record covers only this small, single-site exploratory phase; no subsequent evidence of wider rollout or scaled deployment beyond the initial Cape Town pilot was found, so the practice's demonstrated reach and sustainability remain limited despite its methodological rigour.

Read the full analysis: https://sacj.cs.uct.ac.za/index.php/sacj/article/download/236/120