It knows only 32 words, but someday, it may get a grip on the entire human vocabulary. A group of engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University gave this term a twist and created a hand that talks. The students Bhargav Bhat, Hemant Sikaria, Jorge L. Meza and Wesley Jin demonstrated their project ‘HandTalk‘ a sensor equipped glove that translates finger and hand gestures into spoken words.

The motivation for this concept is to enable the communication between deaf persons and persons that do not have knowledge of the Sign language.

The HandTalk works like this: sensors in the glove pick up gestures and transmit the data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a cell phone which runs a Text to Speech software. The sensor data are converted first into text and then to voice output. A person not knowledgeable in Sign language can listen via the cell phone what the other person is saying in Sign language form.

via [talk2myshirt]