New gloves convert sign language into speech

Damascus, SANA- Ukraine team has developed a system they call “Enable Talk” which is a truly unique and useful as it allows hearing impaired people who rely on sign language to communicate to those who can hear by employing a pair of sensor enabled gloves.

The gloves are able to capture sign language gestures, translate them to text and then have the words spoken using a text-to-speech translator on a cell phone.

The gloves work through the use of five hardware components: flex sensors in the gloves record finger movements and a main controller coordinates information from an accelerometer/compass, an accelerometer/gyroscope, a microcontroller and a Bluetooth module. Windows mobile software was used to convert the gesture commands to sound signals for broadcast by the Bluetooth module.

The sound waves are converted to voice using Microsoft Speech and Bing APIs running on a Smartphone, which ultimately serves as the voice for the person using the system.

The team said the idea for their system came from the frustration they experienced when trying to communicate with hearing impaired athletes at their school. They also noted that the system can be easily tweaked by the user to incorporate custom signs and thus can be used for virtually any sign language dialect.

R. al-Jazaeri / Ghossoun

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