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„Blindness separates us from things, but deafness separates us from people.” (Helen Keller)

Show your voice! The InterpreterGlove system operates as a sign language interpreter, enabling the speech- and hearing-impaired to communicate with the nondisabled using sign language, their native language. As the signs are automatically transformed to text and audible speech, this solution will significantly improve the communication for the hearing-disabled.

As a technical R&D project, the InterpreterGlove aims at creating an innovative, intelligent tool that helps disabled users to get in touch with people in everyday situations leading intuitive and natural conversations.

Today hearing-impaired people need to give complicated and lengthy explanations, or ask a signer for help. As with InterpreterGlove they can communicate easily with anyone, the tool will greatly enhance the social integration of hearing-impaired people. Users will be able to handle everyday situations - from shopping through personal banking to education - which were problematic before. InterpreterGlove opens up many possibilities, also making access to the job market easier for the disabled.

Throughout the project a complex hardware-software system is being developed. The communication module, the electronic parts and the sensors that detect handgestures are integrated in a seamless, ergonomic glove that lets the user’s hand move freely. Using the one-handed glove they can show custom gestures that are mapped to user specified expressions or sentences, and they can also use international fingerspelling to communicate freely. The glove connects to the user's cell phone or tablet that is responsible to perform complex tasks and computation like transforming the gesture stream to letters, words and to text using natural language processing algorithms, and finally reading out the result with the help of a built-in speech synthesizer.