You're reading: TechCrunch: Ukrainians develop gloves that translate sign language into speech

There is no dearth of impressive student projects here at the finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in Sydney, but one of the six finalists that caught my attention was a project called EnableTalk by the Ukrainian team QuadSquad.

There are currently about 40 million
deaf, mute and deaf-mute people and many of them use sign language to
communicate, but there are very few people who actually understand sign
language. Using gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life) the EnableTalk team
has built a system that can translate sign language into text and then
into spoken words using a text-to-speech engine. The whole system then
connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth.

Read more here.