Now, smart glove for speech-impaired to enable better communication

COIMBATORE: Students of Amrita School of Engineering’s ‘Amrita Robotics Research Lab (ARRL)’ have developed a ‘smart glove’ called ‘MUDRA’ which converts hand gestures based on Indian sign language into spoken English, potentially paving the way for speech-impaired individuals to communicate more effectively with others.

A team of four B. Tech students — Abhijith Bhaskaran, Anoop G. Nair, Deepak Ram and Krishnan Ananthanarayanan, achieved the feat. HR Nandi Vardhan, assistant professor, department of ECE, Amrita School of Engineering, mentored the team.

“According to the 2011 census, 12 million Indians have some kind of speech or hearing disability. They face many issues in society because they are unable to communicate normally or express themselves effectively. They communicate through sign language and hand gestures, which are often ridiculed by others, creating social insecurities in them. This smart glove is developed to help bridge this gap between speech-impaired people and others,” explained Dr T.S.B. Sudarshan, head, research, Amrita School of Engineering.

The glove is a lightweight that can be worn comfortably like a riding bike glove.
It recognises hand gestures in all possible directions and angles using flex resistors, accelerometer and gyroscope. The corresponding output is transmitted as speech through inbuilt speakers.

Talking about the cost, the students say the glove is much cheaper compared to similar gesture-sensing products available today. “The prototype took us 16 weeks to build and costs '7,500. The glove can currently recognise numbers from 1 to 10, and Indian sign language gestures corresponding to words such as ‘morning, night, goodbye, thank you, etc’. It can detect four different states of each finger, and as many as 70 gestures can be configured. The glove is now in advanced stage of the production cycle. We have begun validating its social feasibility,” said Abhijith Bhaskaran.

The team intends to conduct field trials once it has designed user experiments with all possible conditions and permutations. The students faced many challenges while developing the glove.

Initially, they intended to use a camera-based device, but it proved to be bulky and expensive. After much research, flex sensors were tested, refined and integrated with the glove to recognise four different positions of each finger.
The design of the glove was crucial as a stiff hold was required on the fingers.
A range of values was calibrated precisely for each specific position of the finger and the rest was filtered out.

The movement of the hand posed another challenge. Although the inertial measurement unit (IMU) offered values, these were not accurate owing to noise; so filtering techniques were adopted for precision. Since differentiating between various orientations and movements of the hand with only one sensor was proving to be difficult, the students developed a novel method of state estimation, explained the faculty members.

The glove is designed to convert hand gestures in Indian sign language to voice.
The glove can be reprogrammed for a range of applications in which motion-sensor technology plays an important role, such as gaming stations, virtual reality, remote control of devices, robotics and medical industry, said HR Nandi Vardhan.