Prize-winning device may eventually have the potential to help hundreds of millions of hearing-impaired people around the world.

Last May we reported on three Cornell University engineering students who had developed a high-tech glove that translated hand gestures into spoken letters.

Then in June we presented a story about students at the University of Houston who developed a prototype sign language translation device that converted motions and hand shapes into complete audible words.

Now, with the same basic idea in mind, a group of university students from the Computer Academy "Step" in Zaporozhye, Ukraine have developed the next generation of gloves that would allow a wearer to have their sign language instantly translated into speech.

The four students, Anton Stepanov, Anton Posternikov, Maxim Osika, all programmers, and Valeriy Yasakov, a designer, otherwise known as QuadSquad, invented their sensory gloves as part of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition in Sydney, Australia, winning this year’s top prize for their high-tech innovation.

The gloves are fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life). They call their product Enable Talk and the whole system then connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth.

“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,” said the QuadSquad team.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation, Inc.

See Also

• More about language translation
  Translation is the act of rewriting a document, changing it into another language. The original language is called the source language. The language into which the source text is translated is called the target language.
• More about machine translation
  Raw Machine Translation (MT) may be sufficient for communicating via social networks, or getting the gist of a foreign language website. However, MT in itself is not good enough if you require a translation of publishable quality.
• Enable Talk gloves translate sign language to speech by Ryan Whitwam, geek.com
  For many deaf and mute people, sign language is the easiest way to communicate with others. However, relatively few people can understand sign language ? not all deaf people even use it.
• Welcome to Enable Talk
  This is the voice of the sign language.
• Microsoft?s Imagine Cup website
  The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world?s premier student technology competition.