On May 7, at Carnegie Mellon University Center, took place the 13th annual Meeting of the Minds research symposium, where the participants were over 400 undergraduate students who presented their innovative projects including the Assistive Automotive Intelligence Technology destined to drivers and meant to advise them on how to drive safer by controlling their vehicle better.

One of the most interesting technological solutions was the HandTalk a device designed as a wearable glove capable of recognizing sign language and to send signals to the wearer’s cell phone for translating into audible speech.

The Gesture recognition Platform for Deaf Users is developed by Bhargav Bhat, Hemant Sikaria and Priya Narasimhan, who made also a cell phone application that interprets the sign language, but it knows just 32 words at the moment, preparing to learn all the human vocabulary soon.



It seems that the glove has a built-in sensor, along each finger and thumbs are flexor strips charging the electrical resistance, but depending on the amount of digits curled, and an example of how it works is when the wearer holds it in so the cell phone says “Good morning!”, while when the right fingers are in the specific position, the phone translates it as "Thank you for your time!”

The chip reads the positions of the fingers and transmits it wirelessly to the cell phone, but the HandTalk has to learn more sings so it needs some pressure sensors and accelerometers for establishing when fingers are touching and the rotating angle of the hand.

The designers said this is not an expensive technology and that they’ll start testing the enhanced gloves in the following months.