Malayalam live captions and productivity tool for doctor appointments

India has approximately 63 million people with significant hearing impairment — roughly 6.3% of the national population. Kerala, despite its reputation for high literacy, high life expectancy, and one of India's strongest public health systems, has no special provision for deaf access within that system. More than 27,000 children are born deaf across India each year, and Kerala's ageing population — with one of India's highest proportions of elderly residents — carries a growing audiological burden that the state's healthcare infrastructure was not designed to serve with communication support.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 recognised Indian Sign Language and placed obligations on healthcare providers to ensure accessibility. In Kerala, however, ISL is not the primary language of the state's deaf community — Kerala uses its own distinct sign language variety, and ISL-trained interpreters are rare. A 2021 legal analysis by the NLIU Law Review found no rule in the RPwD Act requiring ISL-trained staff in hospitals, and that directives for state interpreter registries remain aspirational. A deaf patient at a government medical college in Thiruvananthapuram or Kozhikode navigates a dense clinical consultation with no institutional communication support.

The consequence is systematic: deaf patients in India with communication barriers are less likely to understand their diagnosis, more likely to make medication errors, and more likely to delay follow-up care. A deaf Kerala patient at a major private hospital — among the best-resourced in Asia — is in the same position as a deaf patient at a rural dispensary when it comes to real-time access to what the doctor is saying. Captio AI captions Malayalam speech in real time — at the medical shop, the outpatient department, and the emergency room — without requiring any institutional arrangement.