bitsign
Founding Hospital Proposal
A product of UMI
Universal Motion Intelligence
A personal note
To the leaders responsible for patient care, accessibility and innovation
There are few environments where being understood matters more than healthcare.
For Deaf patients, communication affects autonomy, understanding, safety and dignity. Qualified interpreters remain essential, yet gaps persist across routine interactions, after-hours care, transitional moments and the time before interpreter access is available.
bitsign was built to close that gap.
Our platform delivers real-time, bidirectional communication between Deaf patients and hearing clinicians, translating natural signed language into speech or text and returning spoken communication through an accessible response layer. It is built on an existing ASL intelligence architecture, a multimodal translation pipeline, a continuous benchmarking system and a healthcare-focused security stack.
The technology is moving quickly. Healthcare changes the standard. Our current work is focused on clinical-grade performance, known failure boundaries, confidential computing, privacy, accessibility, workflow integration and enterprise deployment.
We are now selecting hospital partners for early clinical integration and pilot deployment. The opportunity is straightforward: adapt bitsign to the realities of your environment, establish the right operational and clinical boundaries, and determine whether there is a path to enterprise deployment.
Healthcare already operates within strict effective-communication requirements under the ADA, Section 504 and Section 1557. We are developing bitsign in parallel with those requirements, engaging accessibility stakeholders, the Deaf community, security architecture, healthcare leadership and policymakers, including current dialogue with Congresswoman Debbie Dingell's office around Deaf healthcare accessibility and emerging AI.
Our security architecture incorporates confidential computing, Trusted Execution Environments, encryption and privacy-first processing for HIPAA-regulated environments.
We would welcome a working session with your clinical, accessibility, security and innovation leadership to assess fit. If the alignment is there, the next step is simple: design the right pilot, and measure it properly.
Michael J. Parker
Co-Founder & CEO, bitsign
A product of UMI / Universal Motion Intelligence
A founding hospital innovation opportunity
Real-time communication through human motion
bitsign combines existing ASL intelligence, multimodal translation, continuous competitive benchmarking and healthcare-focused security architecture in a platform now advancing through clinical refinement and deployment preparation.
The problem
Hospitals have legal obligations to provide effective communication under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and, where applicable, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. Qualified interpreters remain essential. But interpreter access can involve availability constraints, scheduling friction, delays and after-hours challenges. Different clinical interactions call for different levels and forms of accommodation.
What bitsign is
bitsign is a real-time, bidirectional communication system for Deaf and hard-of-hearing patients and hearing clinicians. It translates natural signed language into speech or text and returns spoken communication through an accessible response layer. The platform runs on an existing ASL intelligence and translation architecture, operational at the model and benchmarking layer, and is undergoing continuous performance optimization and validation — led by Deaf validators, to meet the standard healthcare requires.
Why sign language first
Sign language is not a simplified gesture-recognition problem. It requires machines to simultaneously understand hands, finger configuration, face, nonmanual signals, body, orientation, space, movement, sequence, time and context, together, as language. Sign language is the beginning — not the boundary.
The larger vision
Some patients cannot speak, type, or use their hands. Human intention may still be communicated through eye gaze, facial expression, small movements, posture and context. UMI's broader research agenda extends this same architecture toward multimodal human communication more generally. Sign language is the proving ground; the underlying capability is designed to generalize.
Why now
Computer vision, 3D tracking, temporal modeling, multimodal AI, language reasoning, neural speech and confidential computing have each matured independently. The technologies required to solve this problem have now converged — which is why we are moving on this deliberately and quickly.
The opportunity: help shape how an active technology program enters healthcare, before broad deployment.
The proposed relationship
A pilot built with healthcare, not just for it
We propose the bitsign Founding Hospital Program: a non-binding, staged relationship in which your hospital becomes an early clinical innovation partner, a design partner and a pilot site — and, as agreed performance, security and clinical-readiness gates are cleared, potentially the first hospital enterprise deployment partner for bitsign. This is an invitation to help shape the clinical implementation before broad hospital deployment.
What we bring
- bitsign engineering team
- Existing ASL intelligence and translation architecture
- Multimodal motion + language modeling
- A continuous competitive benchmarking architecture built to accelerate performance
- Secure, confidential-compute architecture
- Deaf-centered validation philosophy
- Company leadership engaged directly
- Active policy and accessibility engagement
Partner value
- Priority access to the bitsign clinical platform
- Direct influence over clinical workflow design
- A voice in defining healthcare requirements
- Priority access to pilot deployments
- Direct collaboration with bitsign engineering leadership
- A role in shaping accessibility and patient-experience standards
- Priority position for enterprise deployment following successful pilot validation
- Recognition as a founding clinical integration partner, if mutually approved
Partner contribution
- Clinical workflow insight
- Accessibility and ADA expertise
- Security and compliance input
- Definition of appropriate and inappropriate use cases
- Identification of appropriate pilot environments
- Structured feedback during development
- A structured clinical pilot following agreed readiness and security review
Pilot outcomes
- Validated healthcare workflows
- Documented clinical and accessibility acceptance criteria
- Measured translation performance and known failure boundaries
- Security and privacy approval
- Patient and user feedback
- An enterprise deployment roadmap
- A potential first hospital enterprise relationship
Not a replacement for human interpreters
Qualified human interpreters remain essential, particularly for complex, sensitive or legally significant interactions. Between no communication and an immediately available interpreter lies a large space bitsign is designed to fill — rapid, low-acuity, navigational and administrative interactions — with escalation to a qualified interpreter built in wherever the interaction requires it.
On patient data
No hospital patient data is assumed available simply because a relationship exists. Any data use requires appropriate consent, governance, agreements and security review, conducted with your teams before any patient-facing pilot begins.
The first conversation: a 45–60 minute exploratory meeting. Clinical leadership. Accessibility. Security. Innovation.
Trust, team and next step
Built for the environment where trust matters most
Security & privacy by design
Healthcare security requirements are embedded at the architecture level.
- Confidential computing / Trusted Execution Environments
- Encrypted communications and secure inference architecture
- Data minimization principles and controlled access
- Auditability and workload segmentation where appropriate
- Engineered for HIPAA-regulated healthcare environments
Privacy is an architectural requirement, not a feature added later. Any hospital pilot will undergo appropriate security, privacy, legal and accessibility review, and, where applicable, HIPAA / business-associate analysis, before patient-facing deployment.
Deaf-centered development
Sign-language technology should not be designed solely by hearing engineers. bitsign is being developed with the community it is intended to serve: Deaf-user involvement, natural ASL rather than literal English-to-sign assumptions, validation by qualified signers, and measurement of failures, not merely successful demos. In healthcare, accuracy is a human requirement.
Team
Michael J. Parker — Co-Founder & CEO
Twenty-six years building and operating a real estate investment company, and founder of THESIS, a private investment and financial-intelligence initiative. Leads bitsign's vision, product direction and strategy.
Koyuki Nakamori — Co-Founder & Head of AI
Founder of Vocence, the voice-intelligence platform that evolved into UMI, and former Head of AI at the Open Tensor Foundation. Built the original voice technology in UMI's stack and now leads AI direction across UMI and bitsign.
Sam Johnson — Lead Development Partner
M.S. in Computer Science, Brown University. Scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where his work spanned deep learning, computer vision and 3D spatial reconstruction — including RAPTOR, a computer-vision system he founded that recovers an object's 3D position and orientation from a single 2D image. Former CTO, where he built an engineering organization to SOC 2 Type II certification. Leads bitsign's development team.
External engagement
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell's office has expressed interest in discussing the technology and Deaf healthcare accessibility, and a conversation has been requested through the office's legislative staff. NIDILRR personnel have indicated the bitsign concept may fit programs such as SBIR and Field-Initiated Projects. UMI has also been evaluating participation in the Toyota Mobility Foundation's Mobility Unlimited Hub program. Each of these relationships reflects outreach and evaluation, not a formal award, selection or endorsement.
The first step is simple.
A 45–60 minute working session. No procurement decision. No deployment commitment. No patient-data commitment.
Michael J. Parker — Co-Founder & CEO, UMI
909-801-0642 · hello@umi.vision