An Assistive Hand Glove for Hearing and Speech Impaired Persons

Communication is more than spoken language; it is a way of expressing ones thought, ideas and messages. Communication for them has become a great challenge especially the need to communicate with normal people in their daily routine. Hearing/Speech Impaired persons used hand sign language as their language of communication; however, it will only be effective if the person they are interacting with knew the hand sign language. This study developed an assistive device for persons with hearing/speech impairment. The system was designed to interpret their signs or gesture into a corresponding message which were preloaded in the device. The device produced a voice-based message through the audio module and displays the message in LCD. This study was basically a glove based system and a microcontroller based system. Flex sensors, Gyroscope and Accelerometer were incorporated in a glove that can identify the sign language and an Arduino Nano microcontroller unit converted these gestures into voice and text output. The result of the Assistive device during its test-experiments showed that the system can recognized the hand gestures with male and female voice output on each hand gesture with an overall accuracy of recognition of 83.58%.