Talking Hands No Longer Silent 7/15/2012 by: Darleen Hartley
Gloves with sensors are turning sign language gestures into the
spoken word via a smartphone. Sign language is the way people
with hearing loss are able to communicate with the rest of the
world. A new technology is emerging for hearing individuals who
don't understand the special technique of talking with your
hands. Students from the Ukraine have created a method, called
Enable Talk that translates sign language into speech. As first
prize winners in Microsoft's annual Imagine Cup this year in
Australia, they took home $25,000 and a dream of actually giving
the deaf a means of communicating with everyone else. Their
prototype is complicated. The gloves have 11 flex sensors, eight
touch sensors, an accelerometer/compass and accelerometer
gyroscope built in. The data is transmitted to a controller with
a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone. The phone's API
provides a computerized voice that translates the movements into
speech. Microsoft Speech A