Tag Archives: quad squad

Ukrainians ease communication with $50 gloves that convert sign language to speech

Strictly speaking or otherwise, this is not a ‘nano’ story but it does speak (wordplay intended) to some longstanding interests of mine. Christina Chaey in her July 10, 2012 article for Fast Company notes,

More than 275 million hearing-impaired people are unable to use speech to communicate. Sign language is one solution, but it’s only as helpful as the number of people who know the language. That problem is what drove three Ukrainian students to develop EnableTalk, a pair of sensory gloves that help bridge that communication gap by turning sign language into speech.

The three-programmer team behind EnableTalk, who were inspired by interactions with hearing-impaired athletes at their school, took the $25,000 top prize in software design at Microsoft’s 10th annual Imagine Cup. The decade-old tech competition challenges students to design innovative technology across various categories including game design, Kinect, the Windows Phone, and Windows 8.

Bob Yirka in his July 11, 2012 article about Enable Talk for physorg.com provides some insight on why the team chose their project,

The team said the idea for their system came from the frustration they experienced when trying to communicate with hearing impaired athletes at their school. … The problem with sign language they point out, is that most people who can hear never learn it, thus those with hearing impairments are only able to communicate with a small part of the general population which generally includes those who cannot hear and those in their immediate circle.

The quadsquad receiving their $25,000US price,

downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/events/imaginecup/

Yirka offers the best description of the technology that I was able to find (Note: I have removed links),

The gloves work through the use of five hardware components: flex sensors in the gloves record finger movements and a main controller coordinates information from an accelerometer/compass, an accelerometer/gyroscope, a microcontroller and a Bluetooth module. Windows mobile software was used to convert the gesture commands to sound signals for broadcast by the Bluetooth module. The sound waves are converted to voice using Microsoft Speech and Bing APIs running on a Smartphone, which ultimately serves as the voice for the person using the system.

For even more technical details, you can go to the Documentation page on the Enable Talk website.

The quad squad’s Imagine Cup presentation video is pretty glitzy, from the Enable Talk Gallery page,


I was surprised that everyone in those ‘street scenes’ seems to be about the same age and social class, that the streets are so clean, and, coming from the West Coast of Canada, that everyone is the same colour.

ETA July 12, 2012: The article by Christina Chaey indicated the gloves would cost $50 but I notice the video indicates a $200 price tag.  Perhaps the $50 price is what they’re hoping to charge after widespread commercialization?