KOCHI: A group of girl students of BTech final year Electronics & Communication Engineering of Holy Grace Academy of Engineering, Mala, has developed a ‘Gesture Vocaliser’ to help the speech-impaired communicate through sound.
S. Deepthi, Delna Domini, Minu Varghese and Nimya Varghese say their system enables the deaf and mute to talk with others.
“The device-based body positioning technique (mainly hand gestures) is used here. The aim of this system is to make a simple prototype by taking the gestures and converting it into audio and visual form so that it can be understood by everyone,” Minu Varghese told DC.
The model consists of an input part, a control section and the output part. “A hand glouse attached with sensors (bend sensor to determine the bending of fingers and accelerometer to measure the tilting of hand) contributes the input part. The obtained values from the sensors are given to the control section. Arduino UNO is the control section used to compare these values with the reference values of standardised sign language and produce the corresponding pre-recorded output messages, both the audio and display. An audio processor attached with a speaker and an LCD display contributes the output section for both audio and visual outputs,” says Delna.
She said that this introduced model is a modification of ‘microcontroller and sensor- based gesture vocaliser,’ a paper published in Cambridge University in 2008.
“This system consisted of three microcontrollers for the controlling section which is said to be the main disadvantage. The use of three microcontrollers caused high power consumption and low efficiency. The hardware as well as the software section was very complex. Our system is able to do away with all that. Ours is a small portable one which works on 9V small radio battery,” Delna said.
