Wearable Solutions for the Sign Language

Abstract

Effective interpersonal communication is of key importance in the professional environment, but above all in private life. People with hearing problems find it difficult to communicate their thoughts and feelings to the outside world. To enable them to communicate, sign language was created, to be a bridge between the world of deaf people and the world of people without hearing impairment. Every day it is difficult to find people who are not deaf, and who can use sign language. In this paper, the authors describe the methods used for communication between people hard of hearing and people with normal audible range. The article presents the solutions that use vision systems available at the world market as well as descriptions of gloves enabling the mentioned communication. Additionally, the authors describe a self-made glove that is used to translate letters from sign language into text or speech. For this purpose, as detectors of the degree of finger bending, the sensors built based on textile substrates with thin metallic layers, changing their resistance depending on the degree of finger bending are used. The effectiveness of repeating hand gestures in the proposed solution is 86.5%, with 520 hand gestures symbolizing the letters of the Polish alphabet.