Sign Language Translating Gloves
Around 70 million people in the world are hearing-impaired or suffering from hard-of-hearing. This ?Glove? is an easy to use product that enables hearing-impaired and hard-to-hear people to express themselves easily. This glove will enable them to communicate with other people around them. It is the
2025-06-28 16:35:01 - Adil Khan
Sign Language Translating Gloves
Project Area of Specialization Wearables and ImplantableProject SummaryAround 70 million people in the world are hearing-impaired or suffering from hard-of-hearing. This “Glove” is an easy to use product that enables hearing-impaired and hard-to-hear people to express themselves easily. This glove will enable them to communicate with other people around them. It is the one of the first of its kind in Pakistan. The glove chosen is soft, so the user can easily bend his/her fingers and perform different gestures. Flex sensors are attached on the inner side of the fingers of the glove, which respond to the amount of pressure exerted upon them. These are connected on a Vero board, which generates a letter of the American Sign Language alphabet based on the position of the fingers. To differentiate between similar gestures, the glove is also equipped with an accelerometer and pressure sensor. Gyroscope is attach on top of the hand which responds to rotation of the hand. A combination of these two sensors enables us to sketch an algorithm for our process. Coding is done on the basis of the obtained algorithm. The code helps to translate these gestures into a string of written letters and sends to be displayed on a screen or to be spoken out loud by a speaker. Our project initiative was praised by Speech Therapist Miss Tehmina Aamar of 'National Institute of Rehabilitation and Medicine, Islamabad, Pakistan'. A senior teacher, Miss Tayaba Sadaf. of 'National Institute of Hearing Impaired Children, Islamabad,' also applauded our efforts. This project not only helped in enhancing our technical skills but also made us realize that how blessed we were to be able to hear, seeing how difficult it is to communicate for the hearing impaired.
Project ObjectivesAround 70 million people in the world are hearing impaired or hard of hearing. We have designed a product useful for their daily expressiveness. This final year project report is an economic hand gesture glove, which will allow hearing impaired or hard of hearing people, across the world, to express themselves easily through an LCD and speaker.
Project Implementation MethodInitially, we attached the sensors on the top of our fingers. We got a range of values but were not comfortable enough to make out definite values for each gesture. The fingers covered 2 joints of each finger. When the fingers were bent, it was difficult to cover both the joints. So, we decided to attach the sensors on the inside of our fingers. When the fingers are bent, there is a wider range of values. Both the joints are covered easily and when bent, there is a higher pressure exerted on the sensor and different values for each position. The sensors are attached on the gloves via super glue and thread. While attaching we had to be cautious that the flex sensors gets maximum bending while clutching the fingers and do not detach from the finger of the glove. One has to be careful while applying glue on the conductive-ink side because once the ink is damaged or wears off, flex sensor stops working. The tips are covered the most, so they do not sticking off.
The flex sensor is attached in a voltage divider circuit. It does not give values if connected directly to the Arduino. . Before attaching the flex sensors one terminal of the flex sensors was soldered with a wire which lead to +5V and the other terminal was attached to the 10K resistor which lead to the ground and a second wire from the second terminal was going to the analog input of the Arduino.
The above circuit is implemented on a veroboard. Veroboard is attached on the upper side of our hand, below the fingers. All the five flex sensors are connected in the same manner, so a common ground and voltage is given via Arduino. The voltage divider output is connected to A0 to A4 pins on Arduino.
MPU 6050 is attached on a veroboard as well. It has to be stable as it is very sensitive to any type of motion. MPU has 5 pins to be connected on Arduino: Vcc, Gnd, SCL, SDA and INT.
Apart from these two modules; a speaker, sd-card and an amplifier is also connected. Arduino is attached on a wrist band. Amplifier and sd-card module is also attached on the wrist band.
When power is ON, the position and orientation of hand is obtained from the data glove that consists of five Flex sensors on fingers and one accelerometer. Tilting and movement of the palm can be captured by the accelerometer/gyroscope whereas flex sensors can measure the bend of the five fingers when making a sign. Flex sensor are connected as a resistance in voltage divider. These values are formatted into a simple state matrix: five values for the Flex sensors, one for each axis of the accelerometer. Microcontroller then compares that matrix with matrices in database and sends corresponding output to speaker and LCD if it matches with the matrix of any gesture. We are following American Sign Language. When a gesture of an alphabet will be done, speaker will speak out the alphabet and LCD will display it.
Benefits of the Project- It wil help hearing impaired people and hard of hearing people to communicate with normal people in an efficient way
- It can also be used by doctors to examine their patients more efficiently.
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NGOs and charity organizations can perform their work more easily and precisely
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It can be used in music industry to play different instruments using only gloves
We successfully completed all 26 alphabets and were able to demonstrate on each subject possible. Everyone wore the glove and performed different gestures. The results were very good as all the gestures were easily decoded to be displayed and spoken by the speaker.
The accuracy of the glove was around 98%.
We did our coding on the basis of the values obtained from flex sensors of all 5 fingers and MPU 6050. Following is our flowchart.
This is our final project.
| Item Name | Type | No. of Units | Per Unit Cost (in Rs) | Total (in Rs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total in (Rs) | 70000 | |||
| Gloves | Equipment | 4 | 1500 | 6000 |
| Arduino | Equipment | 3 | 1700 | 5100 |
| Flex Sensors | Equipment | 15 | 2000 | 30000 |
| Speaker | Equipment | 1 | 2500 | 2500 |
| MPU 6050 | Equipment | 3 | 700 | 2100 |
| Li-Po Battery | Equipment | 2 | 2000 | 4000 |
| Amplifier | Equipment | 2 | 400 | 800 |
| SD-Card | Equipment | 1 | 1650 | 1650 |
| SD-Card Reader | Equipment | 1 | 600 | 600 |
| Vero Board | Equipment | 3 | 200 | 600 |
| Wires | Equipment | 60 | 20 | 1200 |
| Glue Gun | Equipment | 1 | 2000 | 2000 |
| Glue Gun Sticks | Equipment | 3 | 150 | 450 |
| Double Tape | Equipment | 4 | 150 | 600 |
| Wrist Band | Equipment | 2 | 450 | 900 |
| Shipping | Miscellaneous | 1 | 1500 | 1500 |
| Travelling | Miscellaneous | 1 | 8000 | 8000 |
| Soldering Iron | Equipment | 1 | 2000 | 2000 |