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Speech For The Deaf
I am linus's ho writes "CNN is running a story about gloves which transelate sign language into audble speach, in a stephen hawking type mannor, only, i suppose, much different. The article can be found here"
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A much more informative page that explains the technology (called GRASP - Glove-based Recognition of Auslan using Simple Processing) briefed in the CNN article can be found on Waleed Kadous's website:
GRASP Site:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~waleed/thesis.htm l
More generalized Gesture & Sign Language Recognition Research:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~waleed/gsl-rec/
Also see the self-proclaimed Gesture Recognition Home Page (good resource, tons of links)
http://www.cybernet.com/~ccohen/
Or just search google like I did for 'Machine Gesture Sign Language' and get a wealth of links.
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If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
Secondly, I feel it does offer an advantage -- it uses the medium of communication that the Deaf themselves prefer to use. Sign languages are not a word-for-word translation of English. No offence to Deaf people intended, but if you've ever read any unedited text by Deaf (say, e-mail), their grammar is sometimes poor. It's not because Deaf are stupid, it's just it's not their language, and the language that they do use -- ASL or Auslan or whichever sign language -- is so totally foreign to spoken language that it is hard for them to come to grips with the grammar. So forcing them to use English is already forcing them to do something they'd prefer not to do. It's like saying why bother with Babelfish when anyone could learn Spanish?
Sign languages typically have a finger-spelling system as a fallback. Say you want to specify a name, like McGill. There's no sign for it, so you finger-spell it. Each letter has a corresponding sign. ASL has single-handed fingerspelling, while Auslan has two-handed fingerspelling.
But it's not sign language. A typical sign might be something like "thank" where you touch the chin and move the hand forward (at least in Auslan anyway).
Recognising sign is much harder. Fingerspelling is pretty much position-independent. For sign recognition, you need to track the person's position and motion.
This is not to cast any aspersions on Ryan's work, of course -- especially that he made it so cheaply. I think that's a major accomplishment. But designs for such gloves date back to Grimes' work in 1983 (patent 4,414,537), or James Kramer's work at Stanford in the early 90's (patent 5,047,952).
I want to make this more clear than the previous poster who responded to you did.
Signed English already exists, except that it isn't really a language, and it sucks. See, real sign language (like ASL) has evolved naturally to make use of the medium. For example, to create pronouns, you create a "point" in the signing space where the object or person is imagined to be. Realize from this that ASL signs can't be directly translated to English words, any more than Japanese words can, and also that ASL sentence structure is nothing like English. The point is, to use this as you describe, a deaf person would be learning a whole _new_ language, and in particular, a language that doesn't make any intuitive sense. Imagine if in English, pronouns were handled the way they are in ASL, except translated badly; to communicate the "point" you would speak x,y, and z coordinates of where it is. Wouldn't make any sense, now would it? This is how unnatural signed english is to the deaf, even those who know English very well; it is useless for communicating with the deaf or with the hearing, glove or no.