The communication barrier between deaf and hearing people has always been quite a major issue. Those living or working with deaf-mute people have always needed to learn sign language in order to establish communication. That might not be necessary anymore with this new amazing invention.
Kenyan engineer and innovator, Roy Allela, at only 25 years old has created a set of gloves that will ultimately improve communication and omit the necessity of knowing sign language. His invention, gloves called Sign-IO essentially translate signed hand movements into audible speech via Bluetooth and a smartphone app.
How do these gloves work?
The whole idea behind the invention is the use of text-to-speech function of the android phone. Roy Allela’s innovative gloves feature sensors located on each finger that detect the positioning of each finger, including how much each finger will bend into a given position. The glove connects via Bluetooth to an Android phone which then will leverage use the text-to-speech function to provide translated speech to the hand gestures of a person signing.
These gloves are still in their prototype phase and not available for purchase. Yet, the young inventor has won many awards, including “Hardware Trailblazer Award” from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Roy is still working on improving his invention which indeed will be a revolution in the world of communication for deaf people and their loved ones.
