Smart Hand Glove for Hearing and Speech Impaired

Abstract

With the advancement of technology, we can implement a variety of ideas to serve mankind in numerous ways. Inspired by this, we have developed a smart hand glove system which will be able to help the people having hearing and speech disabilities. In the world of sound, for those without it, sign language is a powerful tool to make their voices heard. The American Sign Language (ASL) is the most frequently used sign language in the world, with some differences depending on the nation. We created a wearable wireless gesture decoder module in this project that can transform the basic set of ASL motions into alphabets and sentences. Our project utilizes a glove that houses a series of flex sensors on the metacarpal and interphalange joints of the fingers to detect the bending of fingers, through piezoresistive (change in electrical resistance when the semiconductor or metal is subjected to mechanical strain) effect. The glove is attached with an accelerometer as well, that helps to detect the hand movements. Simple classification algorithms from machine learning are then applied to translate the gestures into alphabets or words. Keywords: Arduino; MPU6050; Flex sensor; Machine learning; SVM classifier