Four Carnegie Mellon students use a class research project to create a talking glove.  The glove translates American Sign Language (ASL) into speech.  It only knows 32 words at the moment but they hope to refine the concept and increase the vocabulary.

The four students, Bhargav Bhat, Hemant Sikaria, Jorge L. Meza and Wesley Jin, designed the glove using inexpensive technology and off the shelf programs.  The rather large glove uses the varying electrical signals created from the movement of the fingers to tell what hand sign is being used.  The signals are fed into a chip which sends the translated sign wirelessly to a cell phone.  The cell phone translates the signal into text.  Using an off the shelf text to speech program the cell phone then “speaks” the text message.

So far the glove knows 32 words based using a rudimentary language program that the students designed.  The Hand Talk system knows 15 of the 26 ASL letters.  For the system to be able to learn the rest, the glove would need to add more electronics like touch sensors and accelerometers to be able to sense finger touches and hand rotations.

Two gloves will eventually be needed to fully translate sign language.  Further work will then need to be done to coordinate the readings of the two gloves and coordinate the readings between the two gloves.  Further refinements of the text to speech program may also happen.

Further applications envisioned by the team include using Hand Talk for gaming, as a way for doctors to test hand functions, and even to play music, but only on a cell phone keypad.

Although Hand Talk will require many more hours of research, development and study, these students did a remarkable job in only 15 weeks.

For a class project, creating a method that will help deaf individuals communicate with others who don’t know ASL, this is a very good first step.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm under Health, Science and technology.

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