Trauma-informed case management for cross-cultural DV intake. Translation is one tool inside a safety, privacy, and sensitivity-first system.
Communication on a sensitive subject, across cultures, where the case worker is trying to help and may need guidance on community or cultural behaviors that are not their own. Understanding culture in this work can mean saving a life or protecting someone in crisis. Behavioral notes matter. Triggers exist to inform the trained case worker without frightening or alarming the survivor. Translation alone does not cover any of this.
Solo product and interaction lead. UX research, conversational flow, trauma-informed interaction patterns.
On-device end-to-end. NLLB-200 translation, Vosk speech recognition, MMS-TTS for voicing translations, YAMNet for trigger and severity detection. The worker’s HUD is private and English-primary; the phone tabletop bisects between worker and survivor, rotated 180 toward each. Severity flags and cultural cues route to the worker only. Panic-clear erases everything in one breath. The translation is in service of the case work, not the headline.
Trauma-informed translation and resource handoff for domestic-violence case workers. The case worker wears the smart glasses; the phone sits flat on the table between them and the survivor. Speech in either language gets translated on the device (no cloud), and a curated set of safety, housing, legal, and cultural resources surfaces automatically when the survivor's words match a trigger. Notes the worker takes stay on the glasses, never on the shared phone screen.
Case workers and DV survivors who do not share a language need real-time translation that never leaves the room. Cloud translation is a non-starter, because survivor speech may contain disclosures that cannot be sent anywhere. Even the screen of the shared phone can be a privacy hazard if it shows worker notes.
An English-speaking case worker meeting a survivor who speaks Somali, Vietnamese, Spanish (LATAM), or Brazilian Portuguese. The phone is tabletop between them. The worker wears the glasses; the survivor sees the phone, but only the parts of the phone they are meant to see.
Live two-way translation runs on the phone, on-device, with a carefully tuned confidence gate. Curated phrase patterns auto-bookmark relevant resources. A mention of "no place to go" silently saves the local emergency shelter; a mention of a weapon raises a safety-planning banner on the worker's glasses. The worker browses curated resources via touchpad on the glasses, then chooses what to share with the survivor.
The glasses surface is worker-private. Notes, coaching cues, captured verbatim quotes, and the resource catalogue all live here; the survivor cannot see any of it. The captionTop is always the English translation of what the survivor said, because the worker reads it. The Somali appears on the phone tabletop for the survivor, not here. The one exception is verbatim capture, where the survivor's exact Somali words are preserved on the worker's HUD for case notes. Rokid 480 x 640 per eye Micro-LED, monochrome green. Status header 11 sp italic dim at top center; flash banner glyph 56 sp bold mid-screen; captionTop 18 sp medium and captionBottom 14 sp italic; captionResource 13 sp semibold for the two-tab navigator at the bottom that the worker steers by capacitive touchpad on the right temple of the glasses.
Before the conversation begins, the panel shows a small dim italic status header (paused / standby) and the two-tab navigator at the bottom that the worker steers by tapping and scrolling on the temple of the glasses. The middle is intentionally empty so the worker can read the survivor's face.
The status row shows 'live'. The English translation of what the survivor just said locks into the lower-middle of the panel at 18sp medium as the worker's primary reading line. A 14sp italic context line below names the source language and the verbatim-capture affordance. The two-tab navigator stays at the bottom. The Somali never appears on the worker's glasses during ordinary translation; it stays on the survivor side of the phone tabletop.
The survivor described not having anywhere to go. The system has a curated catalogue of phrase patterns mapped to relevant resources; this matches the housing-instability trigger and auto-bookmarks the local emergency shelter. A flash banner briefly surfaces a 56sp star glyph plus a short English caption naming the resource, then fades. The saved count on the Resources tab ticks up. The worker decides later whether to share.
The survivor mentioned a weapon. The system catches this through a curated phrase pattern and raises a prominent imminent-risk flash banner on the worker's display only, never the phone. The 56sp triangle hazard glyph pulls peripheral attention; the italic line below is the coaching message. Beneath the divider sits the worker's primary reading line in English at 18sp medium, and the trigger context in 14sp italic. The triangle is the worldwide signature for hazard.
The survivor said something ('I need to ask my family first') that maps to a cultural-context cue. The system surfaces a short worker-facing note: the Somali concept of collective family decision-making. The 56sp diamond glyph and the italic label name the pattern; the worker's primary reading line is the English translation of what triggered it, with a one-line coaching note below in italic. The navigator highlights the Cultural Notes tab so the worker can drill in for more detail without breaking eye contact.
The worker is two levels deep in the Resources tab: section then category (DV Hotlines) then resource detail. The three depth dots in the upper right show how deep they are. The breadcrumb up top names the category. The phone number is shown but never auto-dialled; the worker stays in control of whether and how to share. 'Share on phone' pushes the resource over to the survivor side of the tabletop.
For most of the session the survivor's words are translated and immediately forgotten; the system holds only the most recent few minutes in working memory. Occasionally a phrase matters word-for-word: a threat, a date, a name. The worker can arm verbatim capture for the next turn. The HUD shows the English translation of what's being captured along with a recording indicator and trigger context; the original Somali is preserved in the on-device audio and case notes, not displayed on the worker's lens.
The phone lies flat between the two people. The bottom half is the worker's; the top half is rotated 180 degrees so it sits right-side-up for the survivor across the table. The worker drives the session from this phone, but the survivor sees only what is intended for them: translations and resources they have been offered.
Before any audio is captured, the worker confirms three things: which language the survivor speaks, that the microphone is actually picking up sound, and that the phone's privacy LED is covered. Each is a separate visible step. None are silent defaults. The worker also gets a reminder of the most useful voice commands. Only then does the "Begin consent flow" button activate.
The phone is in live state. The survivor reads her own Somali caption on the top half (rotated to face her); the worker reads the English translation on the bottom half. A small dotted line marks the table-centerline between them. At the bottom, a 6-dot phase strip shows where the session is in its arc (idle, live, prep, close, browse, share), and a big breathing mic button confirms recording is happening. None of the worker's case notes are anywhere on this screen.
Many DV survivors cannot reliably read in their own language. Reading may be slow under stress, formal literacy may have been disrupted, or the spoken register of the language they grew up with isn’t the one written in the country they fled from. The translation cannot live only as text on screen. When the worker speaks, Samira runs the translation, plays it through the phone speaker as native-sounding MMS-TTS in the survivor’s language, and shows a speaker icon with animated waves on her side so she sees that the voice is actually meant for her. Both parties’ mics stay open the entire time so she can reply in spoken Somali whenever she’s ready.
When the worker arms verbatim capture, the survivor's card on the phone gets a clear red ring and a Somali tag, "waa la xafidaa" (this is being saved). The survivor sees the change too: she knows when her words are being held word-for-word versus when they are being heard and let go. This is the visible-trust principle. The system never silently does something that affects her record.
When the conversation enters the BROWSE phase, the worker can scan eleven curated categories of help: domestic-violence hotlines, housing, legal, healthcare, immigration, mental health, food, children's services, financial, workforce, cultural notes. Each card carries an icon and a short count of saved-vs-listed entries. Anything the trigger system auto-saved during the conversation surfaces in its own panel below.
The worker taps a resource. A full preview opens: the curated description, the phone number, a small note explaining what the survivor will see if it gets shared. Three small actions sit inline (save again, add to the closing PDF, copy to clipboard). The big bottom-of-screen action is the load-bearing one: "Share with survivor." Pressing it sends the Somali version to the survivor side of the tabletop and plays a short text-to-speech rendering.
The resource has crossed to the survivor side. She sees it in Somali, with a clear "case worker is offering" tag at the top so she understands the source. A short Somali audio rendering plays so she does not have to read if reading is hard right now. The worker side shows a small log of what was just shared (no notes, just a transactional confirmation) and a coaching line: wait for her response.
Before anything gets written to disk, the worker sees a single-screen summary of everything from the session: structured fields, attached resources, verbatim quotes captured, and a count of glasses-side notes (the notes themselves stay private; only the count surfaces here). Pressing "Confirm and export" produces an encrypted PDF plus a structured JSON manifest in the worker's designated folder. The worker then delivers them out of band through whatever channel her agency uses.
If anything happens (somebody walks in, the survivor revokes consent, the worker's instinct says stop), "Hope, panic clear" or a corresponding gesture wipes everything from the device's memory. The wipe is deliberately visible. The worker and survivor both see the screen go to a clear erasing state for under two seconds; afterward, nothing of the session remains. Invisibility would not be a trust signal. The wipe has to be witnessed.