These Wearable Sensors Can Recognize, Interpret Sign Language

By: | November 15th, 2015

Image courtesy Texas A&M

If you don’t understand sign language, then communicating with a deaf person can be real tough.

But engineers at Texas A&M University have come up with a solution to this problem: they are developing a smart, wearable device that facilitates communication between the deaf and those who don’t know sign language.

These wearable sensors could one day interpret the gestures in sign language and translate them into English. This amazing technology was among the top award winners in the Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge.

How this device works:

This device has two distinct sensors, one that responds to the movement of the wrist and the other responds to the muscular movements of arm muscles. This awesome technology combines motion sensors and the measurement of electrical activity generated by muscles to interpret hand gestures. A program then converts this data into the English translation.

However, this device is still in its prototype stage, and it can only recognize those words that people use most commonly in their daily conversations. Moreover, there is one shortcoming with this system – it has to be trained to respond to each individual that wears the device, which can take up to 30 minutes to complete.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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