Sign and speak glove

This wire covered glove is capable of turning your hand gestures to speech, and it does so wirelessly. The wide range of sensors include nine flex sensors, four contact sensors, and an accelerometer. The flex sensors do most of the work, monitoring the alignment of the wearer’s finger joints. The contact sensors augment the flex sensor data, helping to differentiate between letters that have similar finger positions. The accelerometer is responsible for decoding movements that go along with the hand positions. They combine to detect all of the letters in the American Sign Language alphabet.

An ATmega644 monitors all of the sensors, and pushes data out through a wireless transmitter. MATLAB is responsible for collecting the data which is coming in over the wireless link. It saves it for later analysis using a Java program. Once the motions have been decoded into letters, they are assembled into sentences and fed into a text-to-speech program.

You’ve probably already guess that there’s a demo video after the break.

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Glove-based touch screen from a CRT monitor

Here’s a bulky old CRT monitor used as a touch-screen without any alterations. It doesn’t use an overlay, but instead detects position using phototransistors in the fingertips of a glove.

Most LCD-based touch screens use some type overlay, like these resistive sensors. But cathode-ray-tube monitors function in a fundamentally different way from LCD screens, using an electron gun and ring of magnets to direct a beam across the screen. The inside of the screen is coated with phosphors which glow when excited by electrons. This project harness that property, using a photo transistor in both the pointer and middle finger of the glove. An FPGA drives the monitor and reads from the sensors. It can extrapolate the position of the phototransistors on the display based on the passing electron beam, and use that as cursor data.

Check out the video after the break to see this in action. It’s fairy accurate, but we’re sure the system can be tightened up a bit from this first prototype. There developers also mention that the system has a bit of trouble with darker shades.

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