A group of Ukrainian students are deservedly receiving a large amount of attention for a very impressive student project that has seen them qualify as one of the six finalists at this year’s Microsoft Imagine Cup. They’ve invented a glove that can translate the movements made by sign language into speech.

Called EnableTalk, the gloves are fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers. They cleverly also added solar cells to increase battery life.

A built in system can translate sign language into text, and then into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine. And the entire system can work over a Bluetooth enabled smartphone connection.

There are currently about 40 million deaf, mute and deaf-mute people in the world.

Many of them use sign language to communicate, but there are very few people who actually understand sign language, or are even bothered to give it a go.

Team QuadSquad describe themselves on their website:

We’re team QuadSquad and we represent our country – Ukraine, and our school – Computer Academy “Step”. Our team consists of three programmers – Anton Stepanov (who is also our captain), Anton Posternikov, and Maxim Osika, and one designer – Valeriy Yasakov. After some interaction with hearing-impaired athletes at our school we’ve got an idea to create a device that would help them to communicate more fully with the rest of the world. That is how the “Enable Talk” project was born. We hope that our solution will help a lot more people.”

TechCrunch says that the “few existing projects that come close to what EnableTalk is proposing generally cost around $1 200, and usually have fewer sensors, use wired connections and don’t come with an integrated software solution. EnableTalk, on the other hand, says that the hardware for its prototypes costs somewhere around $75 per device.”

EnableTalk has another feature that makes this project interesting: “users can teach the system new gestures and modify those that the team plans to ship in a library of standard gestures. Given the high degree of variation among sign languages, which also has regional dialects just like spoken language, this will be a welcome feature for users.”

This is a whole lot of rad. Well done, QuadSquad, and goodluck for the finals.

[Source: TechCrunch]