Two college students from Univesity of Washington in US, Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, just won a $10,000 for inventing SignAloud – gloves that translate sign language into text and speech so that deaf and mute people can communicate with those who don’t speak sign language.
Watch the video below to know more about this new invention of SignAloud and how it can possibly achieve a new level of independence to over 70 million people.
Let’s just hope that these two brilliant inventors live up to its promise in making an international model which will work in different sign languages because it could be a household name even in the Philippines in the future.
Cool! But I believe they would only translate basic ASL. However, ASL or any other visual language has it’s own syntax, word order, phoneme ans facial expressions which would be extremely difficult to convert into spoken words. But this is a bold step towards fulfilling it. – from a professonal Sign Language Interpreter
This is the project proposal of my schoolmate back in 99. Dunno if they finished that thesis/project though.
When I heard of this, I recalled a film I watched long ago: Michael Crichton’s “Congo”. Amy (a gorilla) was using similar gloves to communicate with scientists.
This is brilliant, and I hope they manage to bring this “Sign-To-Speech” software to smartphones so deaf/mute people can use them anywhere.
seriously? Matagal nang paikot-ikot ang thesis topic na yan sa ECE/CpE undergrads sa Pinas.
Ibat-ibang methods. Sad.
Scientists are treated like crap here – no surprise we can’t do anything.