Smart Glove for Hearing and Speech Impaired

Communication is the only medium by which we can share our thoughts or convey the message but for a person with disability (hearing or speech impairment) faces difficulty in communication with normal person. Generally dumb people use sign language for communication, but they find difficulty in commu

Project Title

Smart Glove for Hearing and Speech Impaired

Project Area of Specialization

Wearables and Implantable

Project Summary

Communication is the only medium by which we can share our thoughts or convey the message but for a person with disability (hearing or speech impairment) faces difficulty in communication with normal person. Generally dumb people use sign language for communication, but they find difficulty in communicating with others who don't understand sign language. So, there is a barrier in communication between these two communities.

This work aims to lower this barrier in communication. The main aim of the proposed project is to develop a cost-effective two-way communication system which can give voice to voiceless person with the help of Smart Glove.

The glove will have flex sensors enabled on it. User will be holding the gestures for a particular time in order for the gestures to be detected. Different gestures will be assigned with different sensor values to identify a particular alphabet. Once an alphabet is identified, it will be sent to the Android application. The Android application will convert the alphabet into voice and display it on Android screen, and the particular word will be spoken out. The reply would be in the form of Augmented Reality. The hearing or speech impaired will see text shown in a box on top of the normal person’s head.

Project Objectives

1. Develop a system that incorporates and differentiates the different types of hand movement used in American Sign Language (ASL):

• Flexion 
• Rotation
• Translation.

1. Develop a program that recognizes sensor signals and stores those that correspond to a designated ASL sign into a code library.
2. Successfully output ASL signs in a manner that can be understood by a non ASL speaker.
3. To convert Sign Language into text and speech.
4. To display translated sign language on Android application.
5. To design a two way communication system.

Project Implementation Method

Based on preliminary research, the implementation method is a multiphased process. The objectives defined above can be categorized into two main categories, hardware and software and these are implemented using waterfall approach.

The waterfall model is a breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a specialisation of tasks.

The approach is typically used as it has the following six major phases (each with its own agenda of tasks and issues): Requirement gathering, Analysis, system design, impelementation, integration and testing, and deployment.Taken together, these phases represent the path a project takes from the beginning to its end.

Benefits of the Project

1. This project will eliminate communication gap as it will act as a communication medium for hearing and speech imapired people. 
2. With the help of smart glove, hearing and speech impaired can also play a vital role in the developement of the society.
3. As it is a two way communication system, it will be used by both able and disable individuals. 

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Final Deliverable of our project consists of two parts:

HARDWARE:

The hardware i.e. the Glove in our system is composed mainly of the flex sensors and accelerometer. The testing of each subsystem and the integration of each into the final glove product is described in this section.

To measure the bending angles of fingers or flexion of fingers flex sensors are used as they provide accurate bending values. The flex sensors used are 2.2 flex sensors as they are of the size of ana average hand. The bend angles of the flex sensors would be calculated. These flex sensors will provide analog values based on different bend angles. The flex sensors will be connected to Arduino Nano. The flex sensors will be mounted on the glove to compute flexion. The accelerometer will also be connected with Arduino nano.

The goal of the Bluetooth implementation is to be able to upload sketches to the system and subsequently monitor the serial output, all wirelessly via the Bluetooth module.  This Bluetooth module will be used for wireless connectivity with the Android application.

The team had decided to use an Arduino Nano as the glove’s microprocessor, the entire development board was determined to be far too large for the glove, especially when combined with the other circuit elements and sensors.

SOFTWARE:

The project requires a software program i.e. Mobile Application that can read from flex sensor and accelerometer data and output the corresponding gesture. The goal of the code is to read from each sensor and compare their combined values to a library of signs. To use the accelerometer and flex sensors together seamlessly, the best coding program to use would be Arduino IDE, as the program is both flexible and user friendly. 

For the development of application, react native is used to build mobile application, react native is a library of JavaScript, and is based on react library. We have used visual studio code IDE to build the application.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

IT

Other Industries

Core Technology

Wearables and Implantables

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com