Enable Talk
You may have heard the saying, talking heads, well what do think about talking gloves? Seriously, enable talk helps communication for the deaf. It amazes me how far technology has come over the past few years. For people with disabilities, many technical aids and devices have been life changing and this is yet another example soon to available.
For people who communicate through sign language having a device, or in this case a pair of gloves, that will allow them to talk with others who do not know sign language will certainly expand their ability to be heard.
Called Enable Talk, this project was in the prototype stage it won many design and development awards. Enable Talk aims to transform sign language into a form of verbal communication. The goal of this project is to create a mobile device that can continuously recognize sign language phonemes. They are also working on implementing a cell-phone conversation ability that will use the Enable Talk system.
Let’s get technical
Enable Talk is a pair of gloves that includes microcontroller, 15 flex sensors, accelerometer, gyroscope, and a compass in order to define the position of the glove in space, a Bluetooth module for data transmission from the gloves to a mobile device and a USB-port for the synchronization with the PC and for charging the Li-ion battery that provides power. The glove has solar panels to provide longer intervals between charging and this feature is certainly good for the environment.
Basically Enable Talk is a system that consists of two parts – a hardware part (virtual reality gloves) and a software part, which is developed under Windows Phone 7 / Windows 8. The software solution accepts the information input from the glove sensors and transforms the resulting data into a sound wave. The interaction between the glove and the mobile device works with Bluetooth technology.
Developers are based out of the Ukraine, you can learn more at their website a: www.enabletalk.com
Winners of the Imagine Cup 2012 Award
About the award –
In the past ten years, the Imagine Cup has held its Worldwide Finals all over the globe: Barcelona, Cairo, Delhi, New York, etc. Since starting in 2003 it has now grown to include 358,000 registered students from 183 countries/regions in 2011.
Here are some images to explain how these gloves work:
