Development of a Wearable Device for Sign Language Recognition

This project describes the development of a sign language translator that converts sign language into speech and text by using wearable device. The glove-based device is able to read the movements of a single arm and five (5) fingers. The device consists of five (5) flex sensors to detect finger bending, and an accelerometer to detect arm motions. Based on the combination of these sensors, the device is able to identify any particular gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language (ASL), and translate it into speech via a speaker and text which is displayed on an LCD screen. This article explains mainly on the hardware design of the device. Based on preliminary experimental results on nine (9) simple sign languages, the device demonstrated an average value of 0.74 s to convert a sign language into speech and text, which demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed device.