Andrea J. Saks Chairman of the ITU Joint Coordinating Activity on Accessibility and Human Factors (JCA-AHF)
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Andrea J. Saks, Chairman of the ITU Joint Coordinating Activity on Accessibility and Human Factors (JCA-AHF) [Moderator]
Ms Andrea Saks is a known advocate for ICTs for persons with disabilities and is the daughter of two deaf parents one of whom helped create the first deaf text telephone long before SMS. Her first involvement with ITU standardization activity started in 1991 because unwisely, the British deaf community was badly advised to “upgrade” their text phone system to a non-compatible system thus destroying interoperability between the two English speaking countries USA and the UK. The ITU was the place to make international standards to try and make them internationally compatible. That became V.18 the very first International accessibility standard created in 1995
Since then she has ever increased her scope of involvement internationally to make it possible for all Persons with Disabilities and specific needs to have international access to all communication technology. She has been responsible for encouraging the ITU to welcome the participation of Persons with Disabilities in the Standardization process with captioning and sign language interpretation and alternate print formats and other techniques to ensure full participation. She currently attends many ITU-T and ITU-D study groups and has been promoting the inclusion of accessibility features and functionality in all systems being standardized by ITU, as well writing recommendations on Accessibility Terms and Definitions and technical papers on Accessible Meetings for All and Accessible Remote Participation. She is beginning work with ITU-R working parties re broadcasting for accessible television and spectrum allocation to prevent interference to ADLs, Assistive Listening Devices. She also was largely responsible for the first ITU wide Accessibility Resolution PP 175 created in 2010 at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara Mexico and chaired the update of that resolution at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in 2014 in Busan, South Korea which continues to bring the ITU accessibility policies in line with UNCRPD. She advises many US delegations to the ITU on the subject of Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities and persons with specific needs. She has been a key person in the creation of all accessibility events in ITU, and currently is the Chairman of the ITU JCA-AHF, the Joint Coordination Activity on Accessibility and Human factors, as well as the coordinator of the IGF DCAD, the Internet Governance Forum’s Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability. She is the permanent representative to the ITU for G3ict, the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs. In 2008 she was given the ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award and made a Laureate for her lifelong work in accessibility to telecommunications and ICTs for persons with Disabilities. Her most precious award is the First Class International Social Merit Award given by World Federation of the Deaf at the World Congress of the Deaf which held recently in Istanbul, 2015.
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Mathew Brady USA, (participating remotely)
Matthew Brady is a college student about to complete his studies in Administration of Justice and Religious and Theological Studies at Salve Regina University, a small school located in the state of Rhode Island. He is speaking today about his personal experience with noise-induced hearing loss. In 2009, while still in high school, he damaged his hearing as a result of the over-use of his personal music player, having used it at an extremely high volume. This still impacts his hearing today and is central to the story he will share.
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Dr. Shelly Chadha WHO
Shelly Chadha was trained as an otolaryngologist at the University of Delhi, India and subsequently undertook doctoral studies in public health at the same university. Prior to joining WHO in 2011, she was working as a Professor of Otolaryngology at the Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, India. She has long-standing experience in community ear and hearing care, planning and policy development for hearing care.
Shelly oversees WHO’s work on prevention of deafness and hearing loss including advocacy for prioritisation of hearing care; technical support to countries for development of hearing care strategies and development of technical tools and guidance. She is also responsible for the WHO initiative to ‘Make Listening Safe’, which aims to reduce hearing loss due to exposure to loud sounds in recreational settings.
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Masahito Kawamori (Keio University, Japan; and ITU-T Rapporteur Q28/16 and Q26/16
Since 2009, he is the Rapporteur of Question 28 "Multimedia Framework for e-Health Applications" in Study Group 16 of ITU-T. He is currently the editor of the new draft ITU-T Recommendation “Guidelines for safe listening devices/systems”.
After joining the Information Science Lab, NTT Basic Research Labs, in 1989, he did research and development in artificial intelligence and humanoids. Since 1998 until 2002, he was a research member of "Creating the Brain" Research Project of the JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency)'s CREST ("Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology") Program, doing research on task planning mechanism of human speech based on articulatory dynamics. He was also a lecturer, 1998-2006, at the School of Allied Health Sciences, Kitasato University, Japan. In 2004, he led the development with the University of Tokyo, Japan, on a health information system using wearable sensors that measured the hippocampal function in the brain to detect early signs of dementia. He appeared as speakers at several conferences on e-health, including WHO, IEEE, and WSIS. Since 2013, he is a Project Professor at Keio University, Japan.
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Stephen Wheatley (HearAngel, UK)
Stephen has spent most of his life in business development roles, generally related to new or emerging technologies. In the early 1990s he was one of the team of four who launched Europe's first stolen recovery system. He has tinnitus and some hearing loss (caused by motorcycling and Led Zeppelin) and became involved in hearing health six years ago helping to design and deliver technologies for occupational hearing protection. Over the last 18 months he has focussed on practical measures which can be used to protect
the general public.
Brian Copsey was trained by the General Post Office and British Telecoms over some 21 years in telecommunications, radio, outside broadcast, fiber optics and radio interference. During the 1980s he helped develop equipment and facilities as well as being part of the production team for a number of TV shows including Treasure Hunt. He has worked in ETSI and CEPT since 1991 and ITU in recent years. Within ETSI he chairs ETSI ERM TG 17 and TC safety. TG 17 generates harmonized standards for Broadcast TV and Radio equipment, all forms of PMSE and Assistive Listening Devices. EN 300 422 the major ALD standard has its roots in standards started in 1991.He is active in all CEPT groups which cover ALD activities. Since 2008 he has been investigating and testing the radio interference aspects of ALDs on the behalf of Hearing Aid manufacturers and users of hearing aids.
Dr. Jordi Serrano Pons is a physician (General Practitioner) and Founder of the UniversalDoctor Project, whose initial aim was to improve multilingual communication between health care professionals and patients using digital technologies.
The UniversalDoctor Project has grown and the project is in charge of developing different digital health initiatives.
During the last two years, Jordi has been working as a WHO consultant in the area of digital health across different departments and is a very active member of a new Innovation group created last year in WHO.
He has coordinated the development of different mobile Apps in the BBD department ( Community Based rehabilitation App, Eye Survey App...etc)
The WHO Zika App is one of the last project in which he has been involved:
http://www.imedicalapps.com/2016/03/world-health-organization-zika-app/
Jordi is also Co Founder of Zero Mothers Die, an innovative global public-private partnership initiative focused on reducing maternal mortality through the systematic use of ICTs and mobile health solutions.
Jordi has 10 years of experience in the field of health, innovation and new technologies. He is a widely recognized and active participant in the digital health field both in Europe and abroad, who has combined his knowledge as a physician and entrepreneur to successfully introduce digital health tools in diverse healthcare settings.