Going hand in glove with sign language

The gloved hands moved in thin air, in a pantomime that only those who know sign language could decipher.

However, these were no ordinary gloves. They could speak. “Tôi yêu bạn (I love you)", they said, conveying a core message to deaf and mute people from two students, Pham Thien Tan and Chu Hoang Minh Duc, of the Le Hong Phong High School for gifted students in Ho Chi Minh City.

Listen to the hand: Tan (left) wears the talking glove that allows a smart phone to translate sign language into text and speech. The gesture says, "I love you."

This would help normal people to understand the language of the deaf and mute people and remove an invisible linguistic barrier.

Tân and Đức’s initiative recently won the highest award for high school students in the south at the Viet Nam Science and Technology Fair.

The solution that the two high school students came up with involved a glove and a smart phone. The glove is attached with a Flex Sensor and an MPU6050 sensor.

When the wearer uses the sign language, the sensors will read the movements of the hand, and transmit the data to the phone via an application based on the Android system. The phone screen will display the characters, texts and sounds based on the data.

The sounds that the phone utters now is the sweet and young voice of a female student who is a member of the science club at the Lê Hồng Phong High School for gifted students .

Tan and Duc have so far successfully transcribed 31 hand movements into sounds and speech on the phone. Besides the alphabet, the glove can also ‘speak’ many words and phrases, including “I love you”, “I”, “You”, “Việt Nam”, “Hello”, “Parents”, and “Love”.

 The young “scientists” are planning to write more codes to arrange the words in a sentence properly, and on connecting two gloves to make a full sentence on the smart phone in the near future.

The two friends started working on the “speaking” glove in last August, and “finalized” the product last month, just one day before their examinations, after many sleepless nights.

However, they are not sure when they can finish the linguistic system for the glove, for it is something that requires constant updates.

The talking glove is not their first creation. Earlier, Tan and Duc had collaborated to make other products like a machine to measure alcohol levels and an astronomical telescope.

The first prize in the Viet Nam Science and Technology lFair has only fuelled their aspirations. They dream of attending top-notch scientific and technological centres in the world where they can take their scientific passion to greater heights.

(Source: VNS)